


A Villain State of Mind

by Mikkeneko



Series: The Great Subconscious Club [1]
Category: Marvel Avengers Movies Universe, The Avengers (2012), Thor (2011), X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Brainwashing, Community: norsekink, Gen, Memory Alteration, Psychic Abilities, Torture, Trauma, nonconsensual telepathic therapy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-19
Updated: 2013-04-13
Packaged: 2017-11-14 14:34:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 54,942
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/516232
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mikkeneko/pseuds/Mikkeneko
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for the Norsekink prompt: "SHIELD has Loki in custody, with the gag on to keep him from spellcasting, but they don't really know what to DO with him. They can't give him food or water or attempt to interrogate him with the gag on, and they don't dare take it off. Their solution? Call in a telepath! But Charles Xavier may find more things in Loki's head than SHIELD bargained for..."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> I should probably lead off by apologizing for any OOCness on the part of Charles Xavier. It's been many years since I read the X-men comics, and so his character in this story is based a little bit on that, a little bit on his character in the First Class movie, and a lot on my impression of what kind of guy he is to hold the positions he does.
> 
> This fic also includes at least enough of the First Class movie-verse that Mystique was Charles' foster sister, because seriously, how could I pass up the opportunity for Charles to have an angsty estranged blue sibling in his past?

  
_There's a chair in my head in which I used to sit_  
 _Took a pencil and I wrote the following on it_  
 _"Now there's a key where my wonderful mouth used to be"_  
 _Where can I run to?_  
 _Where can I hide?_  
 _Who will I turn to_  
 _Now I'm in a virgin state of mind_

\-- K's Choice, "Virgin State of Mind"

 

* * *

  
The thing about being director of SHIELD -- and thus the de facto interface between the federal government and what the talking heads referred to as the "superhuman community" -- was that it gave you certain _resources._  Resources that no reasonable person (he liked to think he'd been reasonable, once) in his right mind (he knew he hadn't been _that_  in a while) would consider turning to.  
  
But the situation with the prisoner had gone from bad, to worse, to unacceptable, to critical, and this was the only solution to come out of his brainstorming session that stood a half-chance of working. They had Jane Foster hard at work with all the funding she wanted and the best brains in the country to tap, but Fury had no illusions -- this wasn't like in the movies, where science happened in a five-minute montage and was done. They were months, or more likely years from having a functional Einstein-Rosen bridge of their own. No, they were going to need to deal with this on Earth terms.  
  
And so Fury pulled out his cell phone -- the specially encoded, latest Stark technology that served as his contact with the non-secured network -- and dialed the number in his address book that he never thought he'd need to call.  
  
The phone rang. And rang. It didn't go to voicemail. At last there was a click followed by a rattle, a series of noises that indicated someone had picked a handset out of its cradle. And honestly, this was the twenty-first century, who even _had_  the old-style corded handset phones any more?  
  
Someone who didn't normally need phones to communicate long-distance, Fury supposed.  
  
 _"Hello?"_ The voice on the other end of the line was courteous, controlled -- cultured, with just a hint of a New England accent. The speaker didn't identify himself; Fury supposed that if you had this number in the first place, you were supposed to know who you were calling.  
  
"Nicholas Fury, director of SHIELD," Fury said brusquely.  
  
 _"Ah, Director, good to hear from you,"_ the speaker said pleasantly. _"I trust that you and your people are well. No world-ending crises on your desk this morning, I hope."_  
  
Fury glared at the file on his desk as he spoke. "A situation has come up that we could use your assistance with," he started. "To be more specific, it's a situation that we believe _only_  you can assist with."  
  
 _"I gathered that, or else you wouldn't be calling me,"_ The speaker sounded amused, damn him. _"What's the occasion?"_  
  
Fury hesitated, choosing his words carefully. Stark had sworn up and down when he'd given him the phone that its encryption was unbreakable, but Fury hadn't lived this long by trusting other people's assurances. This communication was over the public network, and therefore inherently unsecure as far as he was concerned. That meant that everything over a certain clearance level could not be discussed on such an open line.  
  
"An extranormal incident occurred on May seventeenth over New York City," Fury began. _Extranormal incident,_  that was how it had gone down on the report, if only because federal bureaucrats didn't like seeing the words 'alien invasion' on their paperwork. "A portal of indeterminate origination opened on top of what was formerly Stark tower, admitting a number of xenomorphs as part of a hostile event. It got pretty messy."  
  
This was all part of the public record, and so nothing critical to reveal. Still, Fury had expected a _bit_  more of a reaction than, _"Yes, I know. We saw it on the news."_  
  
Fury actually pulled his head back to glare at the phone in his hand, wishing that the old fool on the other end was enough with the times to have a video phone just so that his glare would transfer. "And you didn't think to do anything about it?" he ground out.  
  
 _"I had my team assembled, ready to move in if the incursion spread beyond New York City. As it turned out, it was all over well before they could have possibly gotten there anyway. Not that I was in any particular hurry to send my people in to ground zero of a nuclear strike."_  
  
That was _not_  part of the public record, and Fury swore silently at the stinging reminder of his greatest failure of the whole debacle -- even worse, in some ways, than the devastating assault on the Helicarrier. First he'd failed to talk the Council out of that stupid clusterfuck of an idea; then he'd let his own security protocols be violated; and then he hadn't been _fast enough_  to stop the plane from leaving the tarmac. Stark and his team had managed to pull off a miracle, thank God, and turn a catastrophe into a victory; but Fury still felt his failure keenly.  
  
How the hell had news of that even leaked out? Given _who_  he was talking to, Fury wasn't even sure he wanted to know; it was probably all down to some freaky mumbo-jumbo that he wouldn't be able to do anything about anyway, no matter what changes he made to his security protocols.  
  
Christ almighty. With friends like these, who needed enemies?  
  
 _"What about it?"_  the voice prompted him, and Fury pulled himself out of his thoughts with some difficulty.  
  
"Unfortunately we're still dealing with some fallout from the incident," Fury said, the words tasting like ground glass on his tongue. "Specifically, we have a prisoner in custody who was a hostile during the event."  
  
And damn it all, they didn't even _want_  him. The crazy god was supposed to have returned to his castle-in-the-air with his brother Thor at the end of the battle, because they sure as Hell hadn't had the resources to contain him on Earth, not in the long term. Fury had even agreed to give up the Tesseract in the interest of getting the God of Lies out of his hair soonest: and here they were, no thunder god, no Tesseract, a messy interdimensional diplomatic incident brewing on the horizon and _no answers._  
  
There was a pause. When the voice returned, it had taken on a decidedly chilly tone. " _What exactly is it that you need from me, if I may ask? I thought I had made it clear when we opened this line of communications that I was not interested in participating in interrogations. I will not be a party to torture, Director."_  
  
"Actually, what I had in mind was more the opening of a line of communications," Fury said. Not that he was letting out the idea of torture if it were really necessary, of course, but right now it would be worse than pointless. "The prisoner isn't human. Not one of yours, either," he added hastily, before the other man could start getting his defensive hackles up in the wrong direction.  
  
" _I was under the impression that none of the xenomorphs had survived."_  
  
"They didn't."  
  
There was a pause on the other end, one that Fury rather thought was more thoughtful. He'd at least got the man's interest. The ether-Asgardians-whatever-they-were-called were still not very well known on Earth, or at least hadn't been for the last thousand years or so; the public only knew about Thor, and had not yet made the jump to the idea that there was a whole _race_  of them hanging over their heads somewhere. Fury would really rather keep it that way for as long as possible.  
  
 _"And you can't communicate with him at all? Why not?"_  
  
"He can't speak." Fury wasn't interested in explaining exactly why that was the case, not until he'd achieved a face-to-face conference in a nice, _secured_  area.  
  
If Fury could have his way, he would have just _ordered_  the man to show up in Bethesda by nine AM the next morning. But the man on the other end of the line couldn't be ordered to do anything, not even by the U.S. government. Or rather, _especially_  not by the U.S. government, since he and all his people were technically illegal just by existing in the first place. They couldn't be prodded by patriotism, since they had no reason to love the feds. They couldn't be threatened, since they basically had nothing to lose. That left bribery, and that was always the weakest of Fury's persuasion skills. The more so since he didn't really have much that they wanted.  
  
Damn, Fury hated working with extralegal forces. Ones that weren't his own, anyway.  
  
 _"Have you tried writing?"_  the other man asked in a clinical, helpful tone.  
  
They had, actually. On the start of the second week, when watchful prudence had begun to give way to something more desperate. They'd put a pen and a piece of paper in his shackled hands, and he'd written with a speed that was somewhere between impressive and alarming despite the encumberance. Fury supposed that was a skill you got when you grew up in a world where the keyboard had never been invented.  
  
Unfortunately, the mumbo-jumbo handwavey explanation Thor had given him about why they all spoke English apparently didn't extend to the written word, since the language he'd written in was completely incomprehensible to anyone on Fury's staff. The script reminded him vaguely of the flavor text he'd seen on the Lord of the Rings movies a few years back, but no translator programs had turned up anything like a match. Further attempts had yielded two other alphabets -- one of which was completely alien, and the other of which Fury suspected would send a linguistic historian into gibbering ecstatics if the memos could ever be declassified -- before their prisoner had grown frustrated and put the pen six inches through a steel table. Thank God for Hill's superb reflexes, that he hadn't gotten her hand with it.  
  
Fury sighed. "Believe me when I say that I wouldn't be wasting my time or yours if the solution were anything that simple," he said. "For the time being you'll have to take my word that I think this is something that you'll be able to help with. If you'll agree to come in as a consultant, I can explain the entire situation in person."  
  
There was a long, thoughtful silence on the other end of the phone line. Once again, Fury cursed the technological ineptitude that didn't give him a view of the other man's face; so much was in the little details of expression and body language that simply didn't carry over the phone. Normally for a recruiting assignment like this one Fury would have just sent Black Widow, but she was in rehabilitation right at the moment and wouldn't have been able to fool her target for a moment anyway.  
  
In fact, no one could fool him for more than a moment; that was exactly why Fury wanted him. Even the world's best liar couldn't do much against a man who could pluck your thoughts right out of your head.  
  
 _"Very well, Director,"_ the reply finally came. _"I admit that the information you've so begrudgingly divulged has caught my interest. If you can send me your current whereabouts, I can arrange to be there by tomorrow."_  
  
Fury winced, but he supposed it was unavoidable. "Not over an open line. I'll send it to the e-mail we have on file for you. You _do_  know how to work e-mail, don't you?"  
  
A chuckle. _"I could hardly avoid it with all the young students running through my house these days, Director. I hope it won't bother you too terribly if I make my own travel arrangements; I'm not willing to trust you with_ my _location just yet."_  
  
"Of course not." Fury couldn't help the regret in his voice.  
  
Another laugh. _"I'll see you tomorrow, then, and you can explain things in more detail. Oh -- and one more thing, Director Fury..."_  
  
"Yeah?" Fury braced himself to hear an ultimatum, or a demand of reward in exchange for services. You never knew, with these superpowered types, just where their ego would take them.  
  
 _"I do hope that your helicarrier has appropriate handicapped access."_ There was a click, and the line went dead.  
  
  



	2. Chapter 2

 

  
  
The X-Jet dropped him off in an abandoned lot in Selby-by-the-bay. It was clear that they weren't happy about him going off by himself, without even one of the X-men to serve as his backup; but Charles didn't want to expose any of his people to the discomfort (in some cases, a much stronger word would be needed than 'discomfort') they would feel at being in the bowels of a secret government testing facility. Even for some of his younger, less damaged students, there would be some inevitable friction when the mutant clashed with the human, and it was really better all around to just avoid that.  
  
He wasn't worried about his own security at SHIELD's hands. If this had been a trap for him he would have sensed it coming, but this wasn't about him at all. Charles and Fury had put aside their differences and worked together in the past, and he felt confident they could do so again.  
  
Besides, if anything did go wrong, Charles was perfectly capable of getting   _himself_ out. He loved his students dearly, and they him, but sometimes he suspected they viewed him as a harmless, paralyzed old man who needed to be taken care of. Not a fighter, not a soldier. They'd never had need to see him otherwise, and Charles dearly hoped that they never would. Their sometimes-overbearing worry was not offensive, really, and he did not spurn their true affection. But they could handle themselves without him for a day or two. If they could not, then Charles knew he had failed as a teacher.  
  
He was met at the empty dockside by a young woman in nondescript navy and black, with an unmarked car and a poker face. Out of habit Charles brushed the surface of her thoughts, and found no animosity; either she didn't know what he was, or she was one of the all too rare humans who truly felt no antipathy towards mutants.  
  
He could have pried further and found out which, but he didn't. Charles always minded  his manners when he was among the humans, and it would be rude to poke around in her thoughts for no purpose other than to satisfy his own curiosity. He ascertained that she intended him no harm, and that her loyalty was firmly with SHIELD, and that was really all he needed to know.  
  
The agent took him on a circuitous route in a car with the windows tinted and shades drawn down; Charles allowed SHIELD their minor obfuscations. At last they came to an empty airfield with a chopper waiting on the tarmac, and his chauffeur/bodyguard helped to transfer him into the new mode of transit.  
  
As they lifted into the air, the metal and plastic cage thrumming heavily in the wind around them, Charles let his mind wander a bit. After his tantalizingly uninformative conversation with Fury over the phone last night, Charles had taken the liberty of conducting some investigations of his own. He'd gone to Cerebro, turning the power of the great machine on the location he knew concealed the helicarrier; it had taken some searching, but he'd found it in the end.  
  
And what he'd found...  
  
In Cerebro's vision, that hundred-times expanded ghostly view of the world, normal humans appeared as gray. Some were more clear and solid in the vision, some less so, depending on their age and force of mental will, but they were meant to fade into the background if there was no trace in them of superhuman powers. Cerebro was built to isolate the exceptions from the rules, after all.  
  
Mutants, Charles' own kind, appeared in Cerebro in color. Those who were neither mutants nor yet powerless humans -- Stephen Strange, for example, with whom Charles had occasional dealings -- all showed up in their own varying ways, dim or bright or sometimes with an oddly-tinted outline. If they showed up at all; many of them had ways to shield themselves from unwanted scrutiny.  
  
Whatever Fury had in his cells right now, though,   _glowed_  in the mental landscape of Cerebro's vision. The outline was blurred, the details indistinguishable, only a splash of vivid color distorting the space around him. Not human, without question. Not a mutant, either, for mutants were still humans at their base, no matter what other blessings or curses Nature gave them. No, this was something   _other,_   and Charles was unable to fully make sense of what he saw, for it was out of the parameters built into Cerebro's senses.  
  
And yet, Cerebro -- and Charles, for their powers come from the same font --   _was_  able to see him. Not human, yet not completely alien either -- cousin races, still. Kin. Charles, who had devoted his life to the study of the emerging X-gene and the advancement of _Homo superior_ , couldn't help but wonder -- if his own people were the next step in human development, was he looking at what waited several steps further down the road?  
  
It was not an entirely comfortable thought.  
  
Especially not if this distorted riot of color and thought and power was, as Fury claimed, a hostile.  
  
The pitch of noise outside changed, and Charles glanced out the window as the chopper descended onto the landing pad of the helicarrier. The poker-faced agent helped Charles onto the flat paved surface and guided him through the bay doors, and Charles couldn't help but notice the recent, hastily added access ramps placed strategically throughout the corridors. Really, and to think this was a government installation. OSHA would have a fit.  
  
He kept his mind open as they descended through the belly of the aircraft, brushing past the thoughts of the other SHIELD agents they passed. Not so much snooping as gathering surface impressions. For the most part the people here seemed unnerved by Charles' presence, but not half so unnerved as they were by the presence of the mysterious prisoner. Charles got fragmented glimpses of a thin looming figure in dark leather and armor, pale, with black hair and furious green eyes that radiated menace.  
  
Also, it seemed that the young man operating the commissary was a mutant. Charles probed a bit deeper as they passed him by, since the welfare of mutants was always his concern -- but the young fry cook (power to control milk, really? Proof that Charles hadn't seen everything yet after all) didn't seem to be in any distress, apart from the general tense wariness of a mutant going incognito in a non-mutant world. He was not part of Erik's faction, nor Charles'. He had chosen his post willingly, was not being blackmailed or coerced by any external factions -- just a young man going about his job in a chaotic world.  
  
Satisfied, Charles released his scrutiny and continued on.  
  
He met with Fury in a briefing room on what snatches of thought assured him was the detention block. As usual, the man radiated military aggression even when standing still, feet set apart like a bulldog and shoulders thrown back with his hands clasped behind him.  "Professor," he said curtly as Charles entered the room. His face was set and wary, carefully poker-faced, as though rigid discipline of his form and expression would be enough to keep his thoughts contained behind his skin.  
  
Charles smiled and didn't bother to disabuse him of this notion, extending a hand in greeting. "Director," he said, matching Fury's tone. Fury took his hand and shook it carefully, precisely long enough not to imply any rudeness.  
  
With the pleasantries over with, Charles sat back a bit and folded his hands in his lap. "Well, now that I'm here," he said. "Do you want to debrief me about this prisoner of yours, or shall I go see him directly?"  
  
"Debriefing," Fury said with a grimace, and he waved Charles over to a conference table with a number of screens already set up there. "There was a lot I couldn't explain over the phone, and I think it's better if you know what you're getting into before we start messing around with him."  
  
And he launched into a clipped, precise report of the events leading up to and surrounding the alien incursion of Manhattan, now nearly a month ago. Much of it Charles already knew, if from a rather different perspective, but not all of it; he studied the video clips and freeze-frame shots of the subject at hand with interest. _Loki,_  the file named him before Fury does, _Loki of Asgard._     
  
Charles was never a Classics major -- his focus had always been on political science when he wasn't studying biology and genetics -- but he possessed enough background education to recognize _those_  names. As well as the name of his apparent brother, Thor, who was listed in Fury's files not only as a friendly, but an active part of the Avengers initiative. Strange to think that men who'd lived and walked the earth over a thousand years ago could still appear on the surface of the planet as casually as popping down to the corner store -- but then, Charles had made a living working with extraordinary things, and this wasn't all that much to adjust to.  
  
It seemed that not all of these strange beings-from-another-time were hostile, then. Thank goodness for that. Although it did raise the question --  
  
"So," Charles said casually as the flow of exposition dried up, "why did you say that your prisoner couldn't talk? He seems to be talking up quite a storm in these video clips." There was a whole theme to his speeches that struck bitterly familiar notes in Charles' mind; he'd heard similar lectures on the inferiority of the human race from Erik's mouth often enough.  
  
Fury's lips compressed into a tight line, a flash of irritation passing over his eyes and then gone. "I'm surprised you even need to ask, Professor," he said brusquely. "Can't you just read the answer out of my head?"  
  
"I could," Charles said mildly, "but that would be rude. And unnecessary, since the entire reason you called this debriefing was to explain the situation here." He sighed. "I'm not here to _pry,_  Director. I have no interest right now in whatever secrets you do not wish to share with me. I came, by request, to work on a problem -- which I can't do without all the pertinent information."  
  
Fury rubbed a hand over his face, and it didn't take a telepath to read the wave of exhaustion that rolled off him as he did. "Sorry," he grunted, the apology sincere for all that it was grudging.  
  
"We never intended to keep the prisoner onboard the Helicarrier this long. Actually, we never intended to retain him in captivity at all. His daddy wanted him back, and I was all too happy to pass him back into Asgard's hands and get him off ours. I surrendered the Tessaract to Thor to use to take them both back, since apparently their own local dimension-traveling machine is still broken after Loki went on a tear up there as well." He paused for breath.  
  
"So what happened?" Charles prompted, when the pause went on too long. "Since Loki appears to still be here, and Thor does not." At least, Charles had seen no sign of him when he went searching with Cerebro; and if his signature was anything like so bright and confused as his brother's, there's no way Charles could have missed him.  
  
Fury grimaced. "We don't know for sure," he said. "They left on schedule, vanishing right out of Central Park. Then an hour or so later, there's an almighty bang in the sky and down comes Loki, falling right out of the air -- made a hell of a crater when he landed, too. At that point there wasn't much we   _could_   do except scrape him up off the ground and put him back in his cell.  
  
"Thor never came back, but our local Einstein-Rosen expert managed to put a call through to Asgard -- a micro-portal wide enough to bounce a signal, but apparently not a body -- and get hold of him for long enough to talk. We've got the recording if you want to watch, but it's not very informative. He basically only tells us that something went wrong mid-transfer and he's not sure what, and asks us to keep his crazy brother quiet until he can get back here and pick him up. He said he'd be back within three days." Fury paused.  "That was twenty days ago."  
  
"Ah." No wonder Fury looked harassed. Still -- this was all very dramatic, but missing one crucial detail. "So why, to get back to my original question, can't Loki talk?" The only explanation he can think of is that the man -- god, alien, whatever he is -- was injured badly enough in the fall to put him into a coma, but that wouldn't explain why Fury had called him in. Even Charles couldn't have a conversation with a patient who was completely comatose.  
  
Fury's jaw tightened, and he took a breath. Charles' attention sharpened on him, and he caught the thought ' _He's not going to like this'_  flit past, before he said in a hard, clipped voice; "He can't talk because we haven't removed the gag."  
  
"What?" Charles's voice crackled with disbelief, and he mentally reached out and snatched the image from Fury's mind: their dark-haired captive sitting in a cell, being led about on the helicarrier in heavy cuffs, with what looks like half of a metal mask enclosing the lower half of his face. He has to restrain himself before he digs any further; he had promised Fury he wasn't going to go poking around in his mind, after all. He tempered his initial disbelief and outrage, with some difficulty. "You must have, at least for short periods, in order to feed him. Surely he had plenty to say at that time."  
  
Fury shook his head. "You misunderstand," he said. "We haven't removed it _at all._  We don't dare. Thor warned us against it in no uncertain terms -- said that Loki can perform magic if he can 'pass breath over lips,' or something else poetic like that.  
  
"He's a sorcerer, Professor -- like that Strange character, or even worse since he's also a freaking _norse god_ at the same time. He can teleport, or phase through solid matter -- and since we don't have any kind of magic-blocking system in our cells yet, the only way to stop him from   _escaping_   is to keep him from casting any magic at all!"  
  
"How have you been feeding him, then?" Charles asked, attempting to keep his demeanor civil. "Intravenous?"  
  
Fury barked a short laugh. "Would be nice if we could. We haven't found a needle yet that doesn't bend instead of penetrating his skin, or else we could just keep him tranqed up and be done with it."  
  
Charles drew in a careful breath, trying to keep hold of his composure. It would not do to let their tentative alliance become so fragmented so early on. He and the X-men had taken equally desperate measures, Charles knew, at times in the past; this Loki was an immediate and unquestionable threat, and it was only expected that he would prioritize the safety of his men -- not to mention the public at large -- over the welfare of his prisoner.  
  
No matter how his less trusting instincts screamed at him about secret government facilities and the mutants who had been disappeared there, mistreated and experimented and eventually used up and discarded. It was so easy to justify, after all, when your prisoner wasn't   _human._  
  
"Don't ask me how he's lasted this long, because if we knew that we'd be putting it in a bottle and selling it," Fury was still talking. "Asgardians are tough. We kept hoping his brother would come back and take him off our hands, or that we'd at least be able to get in touch with his people and ask for advice on some _other_  way to keep him contained. The current measures are unacceptable, I'm sure you'll be the first to say, but right now we've got no other ideas."  
  
Fury looked him square in the eye, apparently undaunted by whatever expression was on Charles' face right now. "That's where you come in," he said. "Right now, the only source of information we've got on how to keep sorcerers caged is the sorcerer himself. Even if we could uncork the genie without him getting out of the bottle, there's the obvious problem of trusting any intel given to us by the God of Lies."  
  
"So you want me to interrogate him," Charles said flatly. "To find out what weaknesses you can use against him."  
  
Fury made a frustrated gesture. "I want you to do this to   _help_   him," he said. "We're flying blind right now. He's gone twenty days without water -- how much longer can he go before it kills him? How about food? What happened to knock him back to Earth when his brother took him up on the Tessaract Express? If we try to send him up ourselves, is the same thing going to happen again? And what in   _Hell_   has gotten Asgard so distracted that they haven't come back to pick up their stray sheep?"  
  
"You think he would have any idea?" Charles asked. "He's been here the whole time; I doubt he's been receiving regular updates from them."  
  
"I think we can't possibly know less than we do now," Fury replied. "Go pick his brain. See if you can come up with some better way to keep him from skipping his cell than wearing that smile piercing 24/7. We'll see where we can go from there."  


* * *

  
  
Debriefing done, Charles went down to the next level of the detention block; it took half an hour to get him cycled through the half-dozen top-security containment measures built into this place. Charles wondered why they bothered at all, since Fury had apparently no faith in his own security to hold onto stray Asgard sorcerers. But then again, perhaps it was as much to stop others breaking _in_  as their prisoner breaking _out._  
  
Fury had given him an earpiece to wear into the cell, which struck Charles as somewhat redundant since he hardly needed one to communicate with him long distance; on the other hand, transmissions over the communicator could be recorded for posterity. Charles intended to use his own judgment on that matter.  
  
And then Charles set eyes on the god of mischief for the first time.  
  
 _Red._  
  
His first thought was that Loki was much smaller than he'd been expecting, which was ridiculous since the file quite clearly stated Loki's height as well over six feet. He looked smaller sitting down, perhaps, and there could be no question that superhuman constitution or not, the nearly three weeks of deprivation had taken their toll on him. His face was thin and gaunt, the skin drawn tightly over the bones of his collarbones and wrist, all that was visible under the nondescript cotton garments he'd been given to wear.  
  
 _Red._  
  
But perhaps the biggest difference of all was of attitude. In the pictures Charles had caught from the memories of his guards, Loki had _loomed;_  he'd had a way of walking that stated the earth beneath his feet was unworthy of bearing his weight. He'd had a way of looking at you that sized you up and judged you less than a bug beside him, and a terrible, terrible smile that promised deeds great and fell. He'd looked larger than life, more than human -- then.  
  
 _Bright._  
  
Not any more.  
  
The prisoner was seated in a plain metal chair before a small table, both of which were bolted to the floor. His wrists were engulfed by shackles of an alloy unknown to Charles, although he thought it might have shared some properties with Logan's skeletal implants. A chain passed between both wrists, looping under the table to an eye-bolt on the floor, preventing him from raising his hands above the level of the table.  
  
 _Sharp._  
  
Not that he looked all that inclined to try. He sat hunched in place, neither moving nor looking around in response to the opening of the door. His hair was a rat's nest, and his face pale and gray-tinged; his eyes, which had glittered so sharply in the videos, were dull and glassy and stared straight ahead unblinking. He twitched occasionally, the only movement of his spare frame.  
  
"How long has this been going on?" Charles wanted to know.  
  
"He went nonresponsive day before yesterday," Fury answered. "One of the reasons we decided to call you in."  
  
 _Heat._  
  
"Is all these really necessary?" Charles muttered into the open channel. "He's completely out of it. You could probably do away with all this hardware and he wouldn't be in any shape to make a break for it."  
  
"Nope," Fury replied in his ear, his voice flat and practical. "He could be faking it. No way for us to know. Not all of us have built-in lie detectors, Professor."  
  
Charles quirked a bit of a smile at that, although truthfully he didn't feel much like smiling at the moment. There was something about the atmosphere of the cell that was oppressive, in a way that was hard for him to pin down -- if Fury hadn't admitted candidly that he didn't have access to any kind of magical or psychic dampeners, Charles might have suspected the presence of one of those. Something coming from the prisoner himself, then? Fury had said he was a sorcerer -- was he a bit of a psychic himself?  
  
 _Red._  
  
Even right here in the room with him, Charles couldn't get a read on his thoughts, and he _ought_  to have been able to. He could sense the man's presence without a shade of doubt -- bright, chaotic and somehow twice as real as the humans surrounding him -- but that gave him no sense of what was going on in the man's head.  
  
Charles put his elbows on the metal table and leaned into his hands, pressing his fingers against his temples in the habitual gesture that always helped him concentrate his mental facilities. There _was_  something there, Charles could sense it -- but it was faint and discordant, like a radio signal drifting just off the station. He tried to grasp those fleeting impressions, to bring himself in tune --  
  
 _Red._  
  
 _Glow._  
  
 _Metal._  
  
 _Bright._  
  
 _Sharp._  
  
 _Pain._  
  
 _Red._  
  
 _Heat._  
  
 _PAIN --_  
  
"So what's the verdict, professor?" Fury's voice in his ear interrupted his concentration, and Charles grimaced as he opened his eyes. "What evil plots is he hatching?"  
  
"I don't know," Charles snapped back at him, more than a little unnerved by his failure to get a clear reading. "Can you open a book written in a language you've never seen before and read from a random page?"  
  
"Are you saying that you can't communicate with him?" Fury demanded, and a tone of real alarm was beginning to creep into his voice. _Fear pain --_  
  
Charles knew that calling him in had been Fury's last resort, and if he couldn't make a difference, Fury had very few other options. He'd either be forced to do something that would put countless lives at risk, or else take an action that could permanently jeopardize their relations with a dimension-crossing, ultra-powerful race of beings. The situation teetered on the brink of two potential disasters, and the chained, silenced figure in front of Charles was the linchpin.  
  
"Give me some space to work, Nicholas," Charles said. He didn't often use the man's given name, but he wanted Fury to understand how serious he was about this project; no longer detached, no longer interested only in the abstract. For all the bright metal security surrounding them -- _bright metal sharp metal pain --_  Charles knew he was sitting on an unexploded bomb, and defusing it was his responsibility. "I've only been trying for ten minutes."  
  
Fury settled down in a subdued silence, no doubt crouching over his monitors like a hunting animal. Charles blew out his breath, swiping a hand over his scalp, and tried to focus again.  
  
Charles didn't normally need to touch people to initiate a mental connection. Indeed, he didn't even necessarily need to be in the same room as them, although it was always useful to be able to get feedback from their reactions. Sometimes, though, it helped to focus through skin-on-skin contact, helped to anchor the link between one mind and another on the physical plane. Charles reached over the metal table and placed his hands on either side of the prisoner's head, settling his fingers lightly on the man's temples, and tried again.  
  
\-- and the world around him dropped off to insignificance, as the cacophony of heat and darkness and blood and _pain painpainPAIN_  overwhelmed everything.  
  
No wonder Charles hadn't been able to read his mind. He'd assumed Loki's mind would be like a human's, or a mutant's, searching for the conscious sense of self contained tightly within the other's skull. Loki's consciousness was like a mind turned inside out, thoughts and feelings and sensations scattered all on the outside while his self-awareness was buried within, lost deep in memories years past.  
  
Charles had been hearing Loki's thoughts ever since he'd walked into this cell, but he hadn't recognized them for what they were. Now he was plunged into Loki's nightmare, as deep and real as though he had been transported across the leagues of space and time.  
  
 _  
_


	3. Chapter 3

_Darkness. Darkness of Nidavellir, the deep fastness of the dwarfs. Red. Red glow of the forge, Brokk's forge, bright sparks flying as the bellows blow. Heat. Heat of the fire, of glowing metal as it grudgingly reshapes under Eitri's hammer to form wonders._  
  
 _Pain. Pain of his hands, crushed in the clamp Eitri normally uses to hold a piece of metal while he works it, now used to hold_ him, _keep him from running or fighting or doing_ anything  _to save himself._  
  
 _Fear. Panic at his own helplessness, knowing there is no rescue, there is no recourse, that this time he has gone too far. He tried to sabotage the great hammer that Brokk is shaping, knowing it was meant for his brother, knowing it is the finest gift that Nidavellir has ever given to Asgard. The dwarfs are not a forgiving people at the best of time, but this trick, this sabotage, this vandalism is an outrage they will never forgive --_  
  
 _Words bubble up in his mouth like blood; threats of Asgard's retaliation, bribery, trickery, guile, hot spiteful insults, pleas for mercy. Words do not please the dwarfs, and when they cannot silence him with threats or blows, they turn to a more practical solution._  
  
 _A hot coal is picked up from the bed by a pair of metal tongs; hard hands on his face, pushing him down, bending him painfully back over the anvil. Strong fingers pry his jaw open, holding his head fast despite his frantic efforts to jerk away. A cruel voice growls, "Your silver tongue is in need of tempering, Liesmith."_  
  
 _Red and hot and painpainPAIN as the coal is shoved in his mouth, burning his lips and cheeks and tongue and he screams, screams until his throat breaks and bleeds but it can't escape his mouth past that pain. He needs to spit it out, to be rid of it, and his heels beat a frantic tempo against the base of the anvil as the struggles helplessly, mindlessly, in the iron grasp of his captors. He can't even turn his head._  
  
 _Silver needle flashes in the red glow of the forge and one holds him still, pins his head in place and his jaw closed as the other goes to work, thick black thread to sew his mouth shut. Sealed shut. Gagged and bound and silenced and no one will hear him, no one will ever hear him. Words and screams and blood and fire all bubble in his throat but they can't get out, he can't get out, he can never ever get out, no one comes and he is trapped can't speak can't scream can't can't can't --_  
  
Charles wrenched himself free of the nightmare with a tremendous effort, a pained gasp escaping his lips as he broke contact with Loki and fell shaking back to his place across the table.  
  
"Xavier? What's happening?" Fury demanded in his ears, and the guards all look shaken and worried, as though they feel they ought to be shooting something but aren't sure where to aim. "Are you all right, Professor? What'd he try to do to you? Report!"  
  
Charles found his voice, and spoke without taking his eyes away from the transfixed, glassy-eyed prisoner across from him. "Take off the gag."  
  
"Are you out of your mind?" Fury said sharply in his ear. "I've already told you why we can't --"  
  
"Take it off him," Charles repeated more forcefully, and followed it up with a mental  _push_   on the guards that caused them to spring into movement, forgetting for several crucial seconds that the order ought properly to have come from Fury. One of the agents wheeled sharply towards the door, entering the codes to spring it, and hurried out into the corridor beyond; it seemed that the key, or whatever it is, was not in this same cell.  
  
"Now hold on!" Fury protested. "Agent Johnson, stand down! I haven't authorized -- Professor, you can't just order my men around like this!"  
  
"I told you, Director, that I would not be a party to torture." Charles didn't even try to disguise the edge in his voice. He did not normally have a violent temper, preferring to seek peaceful solutions to conflicts; but when his protective instincts were roused, they did so with an implacable vengeance.  
  
"We're not trying to torture him," Fury snapped in return, his voice deeply aggravated. "Everything we've done is in the interests of keeping him contained with a minimum of force."  
  
"Torture might not have been your intention, Director, but it was certainly your result," Charles replied, glancing over at the door as it opened. "Your device triggered some sort of flashback, and he's stuck in it. I can try to bring him out of it, but it's obviously not going to do much good while the gag is still on him."  
  
"Hold it!" Fury's voice barked over the intercom, not just Charles' earpiece. "Nobody move! Professor, need I remind you that we have those restraints there for a  _reason?_   I'm not trying to cause needless suffering here, but we  _can't_   leave him free to use his mumbo-jumbo and escape."  
  
"I will endeavor to keep him contained in the meantime," Charles assured him. "I can block those parts of his mind that give him access to magic."  
  
"You can do that?" Fury demanded suspiciously. "Since when?"  
  
"Director Fury." Despite the tense situation, Charles couldn't keep an edge of amusement out of his tone. "Need I remind you what I do with the rest of my time? With a school full of mutants in various stages of violent adolescence and post-traumatic stress running around, a regular part of my job is ensuring that those powers which pose a danger to others are kept dormant until such time as their owners have self-possession enough to control them. I have quite a lot of practice at it. Trust me."  
  
There came a dark silence over the intercom, and Charles sighed. "Director, this  _was_   what you brought me in for," he said. "You were running out of alternatives. Fortunately, I can provide some. Now let's move on with this."  
  
"You'd better know what you're doing," Fury muttered, and then the intercom flicked off. The Agents guarding the cell jumped nervously a moment later, though, so presumably Fury only redirected his frustration onto them instead. One of the guards left; two more came in, some sort of unfamiliar rifle-style weapons unholstered in their hands (though not, thankfully for Charles' peace of mind, aimed at anything other than the floor.)  
  
"Oh," Charles added just before the door closed again, "please bring us some water."  
  
Despite his bold words towards Fury, Charles was not by any means certain of his ability to control Loki's magic. It was different with mutants -- since their powers all sprang from a common gene, they tended to show up in the same place in every mutant's mind, accounting for individual differences. In a more general way, Charles could stop people from being able to do   _any_   given thing, given advance warning.   
  
The problem was, Loki's mind wasn't like a human's. Even as shattered as his thoughts were right now, Charles could tell that the architecture and the symbols used to frame thoughts were different from any mind he'd ever encountered. And he was not experienced with magic. He wouldn't know what use of magic looked like from the inside of Loki's head until he went for it -- and then he'd just have to hope he was quick enough on the draw to block him.   
  
Of course, first he had to get Loki's consciousness back   _in_   his head, not blown out from here to Svartalfheimr. Charles turned his concentration back on the afflicted demigod, bending his mental powers back on him.  
  
He had no intention of plunging himself into Loki's visions again; once had been enough, and the nightmare -- fueled by Loki's panic and pain -- was strong enough to drag him under and bury him completely. But that first contact had not been in vain; it had left behind a channel, a line as it were, that stretched between them. He worked on pulling Loki back along that channel, drawing him out of the lost places of his mind like he would draw a fish on a hook from a deep sea. Or use a life-line to draw a drowning man from the water.  
  
"Loki," he said, reinforcing his mental line of connection with a verbal one. "Open your eyes. Look at me. You are safe. You are not in the fastness, the dwarves are not here. This is Midgard." He pulled the words from Loki's head, careless of how they fell from his lips as though they were part of his everyday vocabulary. "These visions are not real. Let them fall from you. You are on Midgard, among the humans, and you are safe." For a given value of 'safe,' anyway.  
  
Something thumped down on the table at his elbow, and Charles broke off momentarily to look up and smile at the agent who'd delivered the eight-ounce bottle of water to him. "Oh," he said, "much more water than that, please." She looked flustered, but smiled briefly back at him before turning to hurry back out.  
  
At last, Fury himself strode into the cell, a small bright magnetic code-key held in one hand. He gave Loki a dark look, and Charles a much more doubtful one. "I hope you know what you're doing, Professor," he muttered, before he reached over and with rough hands disengaged the lock of the gag and pulled it free, tossing it to the side. Loki gasped, wrenching himself sideways away from Fury's impatient hands; the moment he was released, he doubled over sideways and spat blood onto the floor.  
  
Charles observed the gag dispassionately as it hit the table. It had not -- he agreed with Fury on this -- been intended as an instrument of torture. It was made to fit over the jaw and lower face, extending inside the mouth to still the tongue. There were no hooks or spikes or sharp edges, nothing cruel. But neither had it been intended for long-term use -- its edges were hard and unyielding, and over the twenty days of wear it had rubbed lip and cheek and gum to bleeding ruin. The bright piece of metal was stained with splashes of bright blood and lines of darker, older blood all along the inside.   
  
Loki's mouth was in terrible shape, his lips parched and withered, his tongue when it lapped out tentatively to test its freedom left a well of bright red in its place. He looked no less lost, disoriented than before, but a little sanity began to return to his eyes.  
  
"Loki," Charles said sharply, giving a little tug on their mental connection to pull Loki's attention to him. He met those green eyes steadily, feeling awareness slowly dawn behind them, feeling the tattered scraps of Loki's consciousness beginning to return to their rightful place. He helped as best as he could, pushing and pulling and guiding, but he dared not push too hard in such an unfamiliar pattern, lest he cause more harm than he helped. The grounding voice was just as important.  "You are on Midgard," he repeated quietly. "You are not there any more. You are among mortals, and you will not be harmed."  
  
"Will not be..." Loki's voice was little more than a croak, after three weeks of disuse. He blinked, his head jerking up and back as he seemed to fall into himself all at once, and looked around to take in the details of his cell. Whatever he saw there apparently did not please him, for he erupted into a towering rage.  
  
" _Release me!"_   he shouted at the top of his voice, ringing painfully in the claustrophobic confines of the cell. "How dare you seek to bind a god, you brazen  _cockroaches,_   you meddle in things far above your capacity to comprehend -- release me at once, or I swear by the nine you will know  _pain,_   you will know -- I will hang you from a rock and call the crows to feast on your eyes, your tongue, your -- I will flay you from the feet up and send the skins to your  _mothers,_   I will --"  
  
For someone who hadn't used his voice in three weeks, he had admirable diction and range, Charles thought. He slipped a few times into what seemed to be another language, the words unfamiliar but their meanings glaringly clear. The SHIELD agents looked more than a little uneasy at this torrent of verbal abuse and threats, but a glance at their superior gave them no direction; Fury's attention and gaze was locked firmly on Charles.  
  
And Charles could hear, as they could not, the frantic undercurrent of panic and desperation running underneath the curses and threats, the desperate raging as he pulled at his bindings and found no give, no escape in any direction. To wake from a nightmare of captivity and pain only to find oneself in another captivity and pain was, Charles thought, not all that much of a trade-up.  
  
So he let Loki vent his rage and fear for a few minutes, let him run through his pent-up energy; he had few reserves and soon exhausted himself, slumping down onto his chair shaking in every limb. Charles reached out and twisted off the cap of the water bottle, pushing it across the table in reach of his hands. "Drink," he urged him.  
  
Loki's eyes snapped to the water bottle, and a burning thirst sprang urgently into the forefront of his mind. The fleeting thought crossed his mind to refuse it, but that was quickly pushed aside by the craving  _need_   for water. Without a word he snatched the bottle up in shaking hands and downed it in long, painful gulps.  
  
As Charles suspected, the bottle was quickly emptied, but fortunately just about then the agent appeared with more; a large pitcher of water and a plastic cup. Charles motioned for her to set it down on the table and then back away; he poured the first glass for Loki himself.  
  
Loki downed half the pitcher before he started to slow, the painful thirst finally abating. The phantom sensation of burning coals in his mouth, Charles knew, also slowly faded. His hands shook as he pressed them against his mouth, feeling for any hint of stitches; when he found none, he dropped his hand and leveled a steely glare at the nearest target. Which happened to be Charles.  
  
"Better?" Charles asked him softly, well aware that the combination of pain and fear and rage that still stormed within Loki made him no less dangerous.   
  
Loki eyed him up and down, and his face pulled into a sneer; it cracked his lips and made them bleed. "How low Midgard's mightiest heroes have fallen," he said in a rasp, "that they bring cripples and degenerate half-men to do their work for them?"  
  
The thing was about being a telepath, the thing  _was,_   you always heard people's intentions along with their words. Charles was quite accustomed to the stinging bile that came along with insults, the seething venom that bubbled behind taunts and slurs and sometimes behind polite smiles. He well knew the flavor of thoughts that hated and despised, and although the words were calculated to hurt, there was no true feeling behind them. They were tests, volleys thrown in the dark to test his reactions.  
  
Instead he heard, a flurry of disjointed thoughts like a swarm of minnows:   _Who is that? New, never seen before. Not a guard. Not a soldier. What does he want? What does he fear? Not a threat. Man of the mind; scholar, doctor, mage? What does he know? How can I get at him? How can I frighten him? How can I make him want to help me?_  
  
It was impossible to feel angry or insulted by someone who was obviously so afraid of   _him._ "Oh, I'm not a superhero," Charles informed him calmly. "I don't even work for SHIELD, really. I'm here as more of a... consultant."  
  
Loki's face stayed a stiff, hostile mask, but his eyes were confused and wary, off-balance. The water had helped somewhat, but he was still swimming with exhaustion, mind and body both ground down by weeks of deprivation. Charles leaned forward and asked him, bluntly, "What else do you need?"  
  
"I need nothing from you," Loki spat, but his thoughts clearly said otherwise:   _Food, please, please, anything, I'm so hungry, please._   Then over that primal need, forceful and clear,   _I must not show weakness. I must not give them any openings, for they will show no mercy. I will not beg, not from them._  
  
Charles turned towards the hovering agent and addressed her cordially, "Would you mind bringing up something from the cafeteria? Anything they have hot would be fine. While that's waiting," he turned his glance towards one of the other Agents hovering by the door, "If you could get one of the snack bars you hide in your desk, Jason, I'd appreciate that."  
  
The young man gawped and stammered for a moment, and after shooting a terrified glance at Fury, fled. He returned in just a few minutes with the foil-wrapped bars in his hands, avoiding his superior's eyes as he held them out. Loki glared at the unfortunate man for a moment, then at Charles, then at the bars; then he snatched them, and tore the wrappings apart with completely unnecessary viciousness. His hands shook as he shoved the food in his mouth and bit down.   
  
"Does caffeine work on you?" Charles asked, mildly curious as he watched Loki devour the granola bars. He could feel the exhaustion pressing down on Loki's mind, dulling his awareness and leaving a gray fog over all of his reactions. "I could arrange for some coffee. I know you're tired, but I have a few questions to ask you before either of us go anywhere."  
  
Alarm shot across Loki's mind like a shooting star, searing-bright and sharp.   _Questions -- pain,_   was the first association that made itself known, an immediate synapse snapping into place. Then,   _I don't know what they want. I know nothing. I have nothing. What can I tell them? What answers will they accept? If I scream convincingly enough, will they believe me when I lie?_  
  
"Thanks for the offer," Loki said from a dry throat, "but I believe I'll pass on your hospitality."   
  
Charles sensed it coming an instant before it happened; the thought of escape lit in Loki's mind, which had been until then too distracted by primal concerns of pain and food and water to think of such an abstract concept. Loki reached out in his mind for something dark and shining, words that formed out of glittering stars. They swirled into shape in his mind, waiting only for the motion of breath over lips --  
  
And Charles reached out and shut it down, pressing over the words like closing his hand over another's on a switch. Stopping motion, stopping use. It was harder than it usually was -- Loki was strong, much stronger than the minds he usually dealt with  -- but in this one area Charles was stronger even than a sorcerer of Asgard.  
  
Loki's eyes jerked up towards him, widening in panic and horror as his magic failed to respond, as the glittering words fell and disintegrated half-envisioned. "What did you   _do?"_   he hissed.   
  
"The condition of removing the gag is to make it no longer necessary," Charles said, calm and steady. "I'm sorry, Loki. But you can't go anywhere, not yet."  
  
"You --" Loki flinched backwards, lowering his head as though he would clutch it in his hands. The chains on his wrist jerked his hands back before they could rise above table-height, and Loki shook his head, his eyes white-rimmed with horror. "You -- how are you doing this? You're in my   _head,_ you --"   _No, not again, not like last time,_   his thoughts wailed.   _Ripping, tearing, twisting -- not again, not again --_  
  
 _Again?_   And wasn't  _that_   an interesting comment, for all it implied. But Charles had no time right now to pursue that thread, because Loki's breathing was increasing at an alarming rate, sliding towards hyperventilation as the demigod succumbed to another panic attack. "Get out, get   _out --"_  
  
What Charles really would have preferred to do now was to back off, to withdraw completely from Loki's mind and give him the space he needs to calm down and regain his composure. He didn't like forcing a connection on an unwilling recipient; it was still an intrusion, no matter how careful he was not to do any lasting harm. But the circumstances didn't allow for that; Loki was still dangerous, still a prisoner, and if he wanted to retain any authority over Loki's treatment he had to demonstrate that he could keep him under control.   
  
So instead of letting go and pulling away, Charles extended his power further, spreading a soothing blanket over Loki's agitated, panic-churning thoughts. He pushed against Loki's stabbing rage and blooming panic with the same force he had used to contain his magic, lessening it -- not completely, for such a lack would likely only imbalance Loki's mind further -- but reducing it to manageable levels. Loki's tense-clenched body relaxed as the panic attack passed off, his hands dropping loosely into his lap as his head tipped back up. He regarded Charles through slitted green eyes, hooded with a new respect and wariness.  
  
"Unexpected masteries," he said in that gravelly voice, "coming from a mortal like you. How did you come by it? Are you a   _seidmadr,_   one who seeks to pervert the forbidden sorceries to your petty ambitions?"   _Seidr, the arts of the volur, the holy women; only a sick and twisted man would pursue them. Like me._ He gave a dry laugh. "Or is it something not studied, but born into you?" He studied Charles narrowly.   _Half-breed? By-blow of the Vanir, some Aesir's bastard? Changeling, torn out of proper realm and place?_  
  
Charles made a mental note that Loki spent an awful lot of time projecting his own circumstances and motivations onto others. "No, both my parents were ordinary humans," he said, answering Loki's unspoken thought rather than his spoken question. "My name is Charles Xavier. I'm a mutant. That is," he added when the word registered no recognition with the other man, "A human born with some alterations to our DNA, that give us certain abilities humans don't normally have. In my case, I have some small psychic abilities." A  _bit_  of an understatement there, but Charles didn't suppose Loki really needed to hear all the details.  
  
Loki jerked back as though he'd been snakebit. "You hear my thoughts?" he said, his voice equal parts startled and horrified. His mind howled a denial so vehement it was hard to break down into words;  _he can see through me; he knows my lies; knows my thoughts; open, vulnerable, unsafe. Never let anyone so close, never let anyone see. Never trusted anyone with such secrets, and now he just reaches in and_ takes them from me?  
  
"Yes, I can," Charles said evenly, not bothering to dissemble or soften the blow. His eyes flicked up to Nick Fury, simmering in the corner like an engine vibrating to be set free. "Given your... track record on truthfulness, Nick Fury asked me to assist with this interview, with the hope that it will make things much quicker and easier for all involved."  
  
Loki stared at him in horror as the implications began to creep in on him; Charles supposed he couldn't really blame him for that, but that was just how things were going to have to be. He needed some time to build up a more permanent block on Loki's magic, so that he wouldn't be able to make a break for it the moment Charles' concentration slipped. Another gag, this one only invisible and less cumbersome than the last. As much as it pained him, he didn't doubt its necessity.  
  
Charles gestured to Fury, signalling him to come forward and take over the questioning. Interview.   _Interrogation_.  However polite and civilized they were going to keep this conversation, there was no arguing that was exactly what it was. Charles concentrated on quenching Loki's anger and fear to manageable levels, enough to keep him lucid and in control of himself.  
  
Fury was all business, and if any of Charles' actions in putting a leash on Loki disturbed him he didn't show it. He leaned forward on the edge of the table, getting almost into Loki's personal space, and growled, "Why'd you come back here? To Earth?"  
  
 _Because Thor likes this realm and I wished to take it from him. Because somewhere there must be a people so weak and unimportant that they would bow to even me. Because I had no choice. Because he --_    That thought broke off and slithered away, leading off into curious blankness which piqued Charles' interest. On the outside, Loki's face curved up into an unfelt smile. "Why, I saw this realm just buzzing with disorder and I felt I just   _had_   to step in and put it to rights, of course," he purred. "There was only so much I could take of watching your blundering incompetence before I simply had to step in and show you mortals how it was done."  
  
That was such obvious bullshit that Fury didn't even bother checking with Charles to see it was a lie; and anyway hadn't answered the right question. "I didn't mean then," he said brusquely. "I meant, why aren't you up in Asgard after you left with Thor? We sure as hell didn't want you back, and if that was an escape attempt, it was the sorriest one I've ever seen."  
  
Loki's eyes flickered with temper. "Rest assured,  _Director,_   that had I sought escape I would have found a much more efficient way of going about it." Just such plans flickered through Loki's mind, compulsively cataloguing all the ways that he could have given his captors the slip from the moment the alien invasion failed. Right up until they put the gag on him, binding his magic, he'd been confident that he could have escaped at any time.   
  
"So why'd you bounce?" Fury demanded.  
  
To his surprise, Loki tipped his head back and let out a harsh cackle of laughter towards the ceiling. "I  _bounced,_   as you so charmingly put it," he spat, "because my so-called brother  _Thor_   is an imbecile that can't be trusted to operate anything more complex than a blunt instrument for smashing things."   _Stupid Thor, lazy shortsighted arrogant golden Thor, why why why can you never once think before you act, once again you leave me behind to pick up the pieces?_  
  
"The Tesseract?" Fury prodded him. "I thought that was your people's technology."  
  
Loki sneered. "It was," he said. "And so are your primitive vehicles your own mortal technology -- and yet I doubt even you would be so foolish as to give the keys of a semi truck to a toddler."  
  
"Are you saying that  _Thor_  screwed up, and that's why you ended up back here?" Fury repeated with disbelief. He glanced back at Charles, who responded with a shrug. Loki wasn't lying; he might be mistaken or lacking in knowledge, but what he was saying was the truth as far as he knew it.  
  
"Travel using the Tesseract is hardly as simple as aiming and pressing a big glowing blue button," Loki explained, slowly as though speaking to a child or to the mentally ill. "One must properly calibrate the probability field to accurately take the measure of what it is transporting. Otherwise, anything not specified in the field will be rejected. As I had the fortune to so spectacularly witness."  _I could have warned him he'd got it wrong, if he had asked me, if he had allowed me to_ speak.   _He knew, he_ knew _what I am, and yet he forgot to take that into account, to change the spell to transport one Aesir and one Jotun instead of two Aesir. Idiot!_  
  
Charles' eyebrows rose at this last revelation, and he had a sudden suspicion they'd stumbled into something very important. "You are not Aesir, as Thor is?" he interrupted. "How did that come about?"  
  
Loki and Fury both twisted around to stare at him, Fury with suspicion, Loki with horror and shock. There was such a spike of fear from Loki then that Charles could not have contained it if he'd tried. "The file --" Charles nodded at Fury; "mentioned that you and he were not related by blood, but it didn't say anything about you being a member of a completely different species."  
  
"That's because   _Thor_   didn't mention it to   _us,_ "  Fury growled, and he sounded no small amount of pissed off about it. "Obviously no one ever taught that boy the concept of 'sharing military intelligence.' "  
  
"Or else he didn't think it was relevant," Charles murmured, studying the chaotic overflow of Loki's thoughts. "Or maybe he preferred to protect his brother's privacy as much as he could."  
  
"Well that's great, but it means we have to rewrite all our assumptions!" Fury complained. "We'd built up a catalogue of observed reactions when Thor was in the hospital during his first stay, but if this boy isn't even a member of the same species, we'll have to scrap our whole file and start over!"  
  
"Oh, what a trial that must be for you," Charles drawled, "facing not one but   _two_   first contacts with representatives of an alien species. An anthropologist's wet dream." Fury only glowered at him.  
  
By this time, Loki had recovered enough to speak. "No doubt it is welcome news," he said, heavy with the sarcasm. "You need not readjust your assumptions at all; Asgard remains the golden realm unsullied, inhabited solely by heroes. The villain is only a Jotun changeling, after all, so what other outcome could have ever been possible?"  
  
"Jotun?" Charles asked. Not because the word meant anything to him in particular, but because he could feel from the furious blot of dark rage and hatred in Loki's mind that it meant quite a lot to   _him._  
  
"Frost giants," Loki spat. "Beasts and monsters of Jotunheim, the scum of all the Nine Realms. It must please you, mortals, to know there are other races out there even more degenerate than your own."  
  
And there,   _there_   was the hatred, the revulsion. The boiling venom, the wish-to-hurt. The hate behind which there was no love. Asgardians were no better than humans, then, after all; where humans hate and despise mutants, Asgardians direct their hatred against other races.   
  
But that wasn't what hit Charles like a splash of cold water, that made his heart twist and his stomach sink. It wasn't Loki's hatred that shook him so but the doubling-back, the hate that swallowed its own tail and became despair. It was a combination he knows well, a bitter poisonous brew that he had faced many times before, in many other minds.   
  
Loki was a frost giant. It was   _himself_   that he hated.  
  
Charles had seen that hatred countless times since he started his project of gathering young mutants, of making his school a refuge where they could flee the torments of the human world, rest, and learn about themselves.   _Internalized racism_ ,  his notes called it, but that was a cold and clinical phrase for the storm of grief and rage and terror and pain that Charles has read in the minds and hearts of far, far too many children.  
  
Hatred against mutants was ingrained in human culture, embedded. Even parents who considered themselves tolerant and accepting -- even the very few who actually   _were  --_   couldn't shield their children from outpouring of derision and disgust that assailed them from every angle. That kind of conditioning couldn't help but leave scars, once the truth was known.  It sometimes took years of careful and patient work to coax his students out of that mindset, to bring them to a place where they could learn to accept their fellows and take pride in their true selves.   
  
Some of them never could.  Others went too far in the opposite direction, turned their hatred inside-out and directed it against the humans instead. Some of them left Charles and went on to Erik, joining his cause instead. And it grieved Charles each and every time it happened, it was a failure whose sting never lessened -- but he kept trying, all the same.   
  
Up until now he'd kept a part of himself detached from the proceedings, sympathetic yet clinical; not  _invested_. He was invested now, and he knew that he could no more walk away from Loki than he could have from Jean, or Scott. Or Kitty, or Kurt, or any of the other students that had, over the years, put their faith in him.  
  
He'd find a way to help Loki. Not to escape captivity, certainly -- that would be a short-sighted and ultimately counterproductive exercise, when Loki returned to vent his rage on his former captors -- but in some better way. Help him find peace within himself, maybe, so that when the time came he could be   _trusted_   with freedom. Help him to be able to   _be_   free, inside and out.  
  
Meanwhile, Fury was asking another question. Running down the list, no doubt, of questions he'd put to Charles in the all-too-unprepared briefing from this morning. "I said," he growled, "why haven't they come back for you? They're two and a half weeks late for your scheduled pickup. Any ideas what could be keeping them?"  
  
"I haven't the faintest idea, I'm afraid," Loki said in a calm voice, while his mind erupted in a scream of anguished fury.    _They don't want me they don't need me not their son not brother not prince not even one of them, cast out abandoned rejected left behind they'd rather leave me here to be eaten slowly by rats on Midgard than even want to_ LOOK AT ME --  
  
Loki tilted his head to the side and his lips curled up in what could, generously, be described as a smile. "Are your precious new Asgard allies letting you down already? You really should not put your trust in princes, you know. Did you not wonder why they ignored you all these years, until you so happened to uncover something of interest to them?" His voice held the faintest of tremors. "They'll treat with you only so long as you have something they need, and then they'll drop you in the gutter like the worthless, miserable  _animals_  that you are --"  
  
 _Definitely_   projecting, Charles thought, as he slapped hard on another uncontrollable swell of emotion: grief and pain and resentment and heartbreak. This was getting out of hand; Charles was not an empath, was not really equipped to deal with specific emotions, not like Dani or Hope. He could do it as an extension of his mental powers, but it wasn't really his forte. He much preferred dealing with the root causes of such self-destructive mental schema, than handling their symptoms piecemeal.  
  
Charles sighed and rubbed a hand over his eyes. Somehow he'd gotten himself sucked right into the situation he swore he wouldn't; standing by and lending his powers to the interrogation of a hostile prisoner. He frowned and let his eye fall on Fury's back, leaning over the table towards Loki and growling out his words. A reassessment of the situation was definitely called for.  
  
Movement outside the cell door attracted his attention; he glanced over that direction and saw the young man he'd sent off to get food for Loki, hovering by the doorway with a tray in his hands. Well. That had taken long enough, although now the timing seemed auspicious. "Director," he said, interrupting Fury mid-sentence. The tall, one-eyed man twisted back and glowered at him. "Why don't we take a little break?"  
  
Fury hesitated, the reluctance to leave off the questioning now that they'd finally gotten a break writ plain on his face. "Some issues have come up that I'd like to discuss with you," Charles added, and Fury acquiesced with a grudging sigh. The hard determination to get as much information out of his prisoner as he could battled with the desire to get out of the room before he gave in to a not-completely-incomprehensible yet highly unprofessional desire to strangle his prisoner for all the cheek he was getting from him.  
  
The two of them filed out of the cell, passing by the tray-bearing guard on their way. The meal seemed to be hamburger stroganoff, and included no cutlery except a flimsy plastic spoon -- a bit pointless, in Charles' opinion. If Loki's hands were free and he decided to attack, he could kill them with his bare hands with no need of a weapon; if they weren't and he didn't, then they might as well at least give him a fork. But that was Fury's operation all over; conscientious paranoia in the smallest of details.  
  
While overlooking some of the rather more major ones. He'd have to see what he could do about that. Now was not, perhaps, the time to push for Loki's unbinding; but that would come in time.


	4. Chapter 4

  
  
"All right, Professor, what's this about?" Fury asked after the heavy, airlock-quality door slid shut behind them.  
  
Xavier shook his head. "Not here, Director. He's still listening."  
  
"The hell he is." Fury shot a doubtful look through the vacuum-layered glass of the one-way observation window at their prisoner. He certainly didn't look like he was paying them any attention, concentrating instead on figuring out how to eat with his hands chained. "That whole cell is completely soundproof."  
  
Xavier sighed. "Soundproof for humans, maybe," he said. "Aesir -- or Jotun, as the case may be -- have somewhat more sensitive hearing. Trust me. He can hear us. Shall we retire elsewhere?"  
  
Loki abandoned his intense concentration on the plastic spoon long enough to shoot them both a poisonous glare at being found out -- apparently, one-way mirrors didn't work on Jotuns either -- before turning his back on them in what could only be described as a massive sulk. Fury blew out his breath, and with a jerk of his head indicated the direction down the corridor behind them. Damn aliens and their damn supernatural senses.  
  
They fetched up in the same conference room as before, when Fury had given Xavier the debriefing (which he now recognized with some annoyance as having some major holes in the intel, but how the hell was he supposed to know?) about Loki.  
  
"Why'd you cut the interview short?" Fury said, turning to Xavier as he accessed the security monitors from the holding cell. Loki was currently attending to the tray of food they'd given him; the chains on his wrists meant he couldn't bring his hands up to his face, and had to hunch down almost to the level of the table to be able to eat.  
  
"Because Loki was growing increasingly exhausted and unstable," Xavier replied. He'd pulled a notebook out of somewhere -- seriously, who still used _paper notebooks_  in the 2010s -- and was making some rapid notes on it. "It's best to give him some time to eat, wash and rest before continuing."  
  
Fury raised his eyebrows. "He seemed fine to me," he said. "Insolent little bastard. Full of sass."  
  
"He only seemed coherent to you because I was actively suppressing his feelings of anger and fear," Xavier said, making more notes. "But that will only go so far as a short-term solution."  
  
Fury's eyebrows raised even further as the implications of this unexpected ability sank in. "Didn't know you could do that," he mused. "Speaking of long-term solutions, isn't there any way you could make that permanent? Take away his anger and hate completely?" A Loki without  his anger issues or epic grudges would be a hell of a lot easier to manage, that was for sure.  
  
Xavier snapped his notebook shut, and gave Fury a cool look it took him a moment to decipher as utterly calm fury. "Yes," he said, "yes, he would be. And as long as we're discussing long-term solutions, why not simply chop off both his arms at the elbow? That would also render him much more manageable, and the degree of mutilation would be about the same."  
  
The hair stood up on the back of his neck, and despite himself Fury couldn't help the nausea that rose unbidden at the mental images the mild-sounding suggestion conjured. Loki, huddled in a corner stained with his own blood, arms and legs ending in stumps -- Fury has seen many terrible things in his career, and done many things that were arguably terrible. But not that. Never that. Not even to Loki.  
  
"That's not how we do things," he told Xavier, and it took a lot of effort to keep his voice steady. Wasted effort, really, because he knew perfectly well that Xavier can see right through him like a pane of glass.  
  
Xavier gave him another of those _looks,_  and then his expression cleared slightly. "I'm glad to hear you say that, Director," he said. "Particularly because if you had not said that -- and meant it -- I would have been obliged to remove Loki from your custody."  
  
 _"What?"_   Fury choked out, feeling his eyes nearly bugging out from his head. "Now, hold on just a minute here! You don't have the authority to --"  
  
"Must I remind you again that I   _don't work for you?"_   Xavier said sharply. "You brought me in as an outside consultant, and that's exactly what I am.  And if you continue to mishandle Loki's situation, I _will_ take him over from you."  
  
"In what way am I   _mishandling_   the situation?" Fury demanded, wondering how the hell he gone from being the Director of S.H.I.E.L.D.  to feeling like a little boy being called to task by one of his tutors. "We've got him completely under control!"  
  
"Under control," Xavier said, and sighed. "Director, I understand that you've had a very stressful couple of weeks --"  
  
Xavier had no idea, Fury thought. Starting with the colossal fuck-up that was Banner's rampage in Harlem, continuing on through Thor's crash-landing in New Mexico and leading right on into that crazy Russian scientist trashing the Stark Expo and then to this entire _fiasco_  with the Tesseract ever since, Fury couldn't even remember the last time he'd gotten a full night's sleep.  
  
" -- but you are, once again, looking only at short-term solutions," Xavier continued. "You're failing to consider a very critical piece of information."  
  
"Which is what?" Fury said belligerently.  
  
"That Loki is functionally immortal." Xavier opened the notebook and set it on the table, his fingers tapping against something that looked like quick arithmetic calculation. " Loki is still a young man by the standards of his people. From what I can gather his father is over seven thousand years old and has been king for most of that time. That's as long as the span of _all of human history._ So right now you have him under control. Can you guarantee that you'll be able to keep him that way for a month? A year? Ten years? A hundred? Can you guarantee that in all that time there will be no disasters, no changes in command or policy, _nothing_  that will crack the iron grip of control you're so proud of?"  
  
Fury shifted uneasily, but didn't answer. He didn't need to; the answer was all too plain in his mind.  
  
Xavier continued remorselessly, "He may not have had a reason to hate us before, but we're certainly giving him plenty of reasons now. Sooner or later he _will_  be free, Director, and when that happens what will you do if he gets out and comes back for us, mad with pain and carrying a grudge against the entire human race for the way we've treated him?" He paused for a moment and waited, but when Fury made no comment he went on.  
  
"If we aren't going to kill him, then we have to find some way to seek reconciliation, because this is not a problem that is going to go away if you leave it in a cell for long enough. Between execution and rehabilitation there is, in the long run, no middle ground."  
  
"Excuse me," Fury said, "I'm not particularly interested in his _rehabilitation."_   _And I haven't completely let out execution as an option,_  he couldn't help but think.  
  
Xavier gave a thin smile. "Perhaps you haven't," he said mildly. "But there's always Asgard to consider. Director, I don't know any more about Asgard than you do, but I have seen Loki's mind. He doesn't fear going back to Asgard, not the way one would fear an execution. He's certainly not looking forward to it, but I very much doubt they mean to kill him, or would tolerate us doing it for them. They haven't done a particularly good job of controlling him up till now; do you really want to stake Earth's future on the bet that they'll do better in the future?"  
  
"...goddamn alien space vikings," Fury muttered. As much as he hated to admit it, Xavier had a point; Fury didn't know enough about Asgard to be sure that he could count on their help. If Thor was anything like a representative of their culture, then it was entirely possible that the entire alien culture between them didn't have the right mindset to hold onto Loki for more than a few years at a time. And Xavier was right again. Loki was a problem without an expiration date. He'd keep coming back again and again until someone found a way to deal with him permanently. There was only one solution Fury knew that was that kind of permanent, and for all Fury knew Loki could find some way to circumvent even   _that._    
  
"Asgard aside, there's another thing to consider," Xavier was saying, bringing Fury out of his bitter thoughts. He folded his hands around that notebook of his. "I couldn't help but notice, when I was taking a look about his mind, that I am not the only one to have done so recently."  
  
Fury stared. "Are you suggesting he was being mind controlled?" he said. Thoughts of Agent Barton and that damnable scepter leapt startled into his mind -- oh,   _hell no,_  this was not a complication he needed now.  
  
"Controlled?" Xavier shook his head. "No, I don't believe so. But there are definitely marks, scars in places where someone with powers not unlike my own was... careless. There are parts of his memory that are sealed away under powerful barriers that are not of his own making." He smiled, a wintery little smile. "I admit I would very much like to know what is behind those blocks; it could be something very valuable to us."  
  
"Such as?" Fury asked, intrigued.  
  
"Such as the identity of whoever sent him here in the first place."  
  
"What do you mean,   _sent_  him here?" Fury demanded.  
  
Xavier's eyebrows rose nearly up to his nonexistent hairline. "What, surely you don't think he came here on his own, do you?"  
  
"Yes!" Fury's mind was sent spinning, playing over his first encounter with Loki and all the subsequent fallout. At the beginning they _had_  been working under the assumption that he was acting alone, and after that events had played out too fast for them to stop and readjust their assumptions at any point.  
  
Xavier gave him a look, and although he didn't say it out loud Fury didn't need to be psychic to read   _Well, that was dumb of you_   on his face. "The army clearly was not his. That's plain enough in his memories even if it wasn't in the disparity of their technology and methods. Someone obviously furnished it for him, someone who was all too pleased to send him along on the front lines and allow him to take the brunt of any counterattack. Most army commanders do not also take the role of advance scout, Director."  
  
Fury groaned. His first reaction, unworthily, was   _Well shit, didn't we have enough problems already?_ He would much rather deal with Loki and all his complications than to have to admit the existence of a bigger, badder enemy behind him who was still out there somewhere and mad as hell. Especially now that they no longer had the Tesseract to fuel their military defense research.  
  
But he was too much of a spy at heart to deny  the existence of new intelligence just because it made him uncomfortable, so reluctantly, he faced the possibility head-on. "So we need to get Loki to spill the beans on his former employer," he said.  
  
Xavier frowned. "I'd like it to be that simple," he said. "Unfortunately, whoever put the mental blocks on him was very thorough. He cannot say their name, or even think it to himself."  
  
"Now that he's able to talk again, I'm sure we can find a way to get around that," Fury said. He strove to keep his voice cool and emotionless, but he also knew there was no point in not saying what was on his mind, since Xavier would pick it up in two seconds anyway. "We have people who specialize in getting past protective conditioning."  
  
"...No." Charles gave him that look again, the one that looked calm but was unutterably angry. "Apart from the fact that I have told you repeatedly I will not condone or assist with any efforts that involve torture, it   _wouldn't work,_   Nick. It's not that kind of block. He himself cannot break it from the inside, no matter how very much you make him   _want_   to. To attempt to force the issue would only crush his mind against that unyielding barrier."  
  
 _I wouldn't cry over that,_   Fury thought.  
  
Xavier folded his hands on the table and leaned back in the wheelchair, and there was that disappointed-tutor look again. "Director, I'm starting to find your bloodthirsty attitude in regards to your prisoner rather disturbing," he said in a neutral voice. "Are you sure you have the necessary objectivity for this?"  
  
"In a word? _No."_  It wasn't the most diplomatic he'd ever been, but there was no point in weaseling words around Xavier; and anyway Fury was getting tired of trying to watch his tongue. Getting tired of Xavier's condescending, voice-from-on-high attitude and especially getting tired of his touchy-feely, hugs-and-kindness attitude towards their prisoner.  Yes, Fury knew the regulations and would stick rigidly to them, because that was what separated men who kept order from men who served nothing but their own desires. He'd make sure Loki got three meals a day and a prisoner's coveralls and a bed to sleep on and proper medical care, should he need it.  
  
But he had no desire to forgive Loki and no desire whatsoever to   _rehabilitate_   him, and if the day came when Loki finally reaped the full measure of what he'd sown, then Fury would pull the trigger and be   _glad_   of it. "Since it seems you haven't been paying attention, Professor, let me remind you: In the course of his little vacation on Earth he busted up one of my labs, terrorized a crowd in Germany, and oh yeah, flattened half of Manhattan during rush hour! Do you have any idea how many people died there? Civilians -- innocents!"  
  
"Innocents?" Xavier said, and his calm, almost cordial tone cut right through the heart of Fury's rant. "Oh, _do_ let's talk about innocents."  
  
Suddenly, Fury wasn't at all sure that he wanted to. But Xavier had gotten the momentum of the conversation away from him, somehow, and ran with it.  
  
"In the past year, the Sentinel initiative hunted down and killed one hundred and twenty-seven adult mutants," Charles said, and the number sounded too precise to be anything but correct. "In the past year, five cities have seen breakouts of anti-mutant riots, with seventeen deaths -- five of whom, I might add, were physically disabled humans and not mutants at all.  
  
"Oh, and let's not forget the Rosemary project -- started in 1997 as an anonymous data census on mutants, then when the bureau changed hands in 2005 turned to soliciting and then eventually kidnapping underage mutants, holding them against their will in a secured facility in Rosemary, Colorado. When the project was shut down in 2009, the cleanup crew decided against the advisability of letting loose a population of embittered and possibly dangerous mutants into the population, and fifty-seven children and teens were given lethal injections. Three escaped. I spoke with them at some length when they came to my school. I still do, every week, as part of their grief counseling.  
  
He'd started out the speech cold and clinical, but by the end of it his anger had clearly taken hold of him; he was angrier than Fury had ever seen him before, even in the dangerous and occasionally bloody occasions where they'd worked together on an operation before.  It was hard to believe that he normally carried this rage so well hidden, so tightly suppressed; allowed sometimes to heat his words or his gaze but never, ever allowed to take control. Not even now.  
  
"None of this even addresses the M.A.D. laws -- now on the books in forty-six states, I believe, including this one -- which state that any suspect known to be a mutant should be considered as armed and hostile even if they have no weapon and show no hostile intent, and authorizes uses of deadly force by authorities under all circumstances up to and including a routine traffic stop." Xavier bites off the words with precise, furious diction. He might as well be spitting nails, each one landing with the force of a hammer blow. "Current estimates run that these laws have lead to the death of over four hundred mutants, not counting non-mutant casualties in escalated situations where mutants defended themselves.  
  
"So do not stand there wearing that badge, Director Fury, do not stand there under the flag of the government that considers all these incidents   _lawful and authorized,_   and talk to me about   _innocents."_  
  
Fury stood there with his hands clenched together behind his back and said nothing at all, swallowing against the angry denials or savage counter-arguments that rose to his teeth. Stood there and tried not to writhe too obviously in shame, because he knew too damn well that what Xavier was saying was true. SHIELD had never been directly involved in anti-mutant initiatives -- none of his projects ever had been -- but nevertheless Fury's clearance was the highest and so he was kept apprised. He was kept informed, in a detached and abstract way, of what measures and countermeasures were taken regarding "the mutant threat," he was given monthly estimates of how angry the experts in the Pentagon estimated the mutant population to be on the heels of another riot, another purge.  
  
And what had Fury done? Nothing, not a damn thing. He'd seen this fight wasn't one he could win and turned away from it, deliberately channeled all his career into fighting battles that seemed cleaner. Simpler. Not always easy, not by a long shot, but fighting alien invasions over Manhattan was nothing so ugly as the brother-against-brother warfare of domestic security. He'd opted out of this battle long ago, and he'd done so without a pang of conscience, because mutants weren't his kind of people.  
  
All the same, Fury hadn't gotten where he was in life by letting other people push him around easily. "So what's your point?" he grated. "You're saying that because mutants have died, it's okay for this guy to kill other people? Like they cancel out somehow? It doesn't work that way."  
  
"No. That is not, in fact, my point." Xavier blew out his breath, squeezing his eyes shut and pressing his fingertips to his face. "My apologies, Director. I vented a great deal more of my feelings than I ought to have, given the circumstances. It won't happen again.

"Do you know why I'm here, Director?" he asked. His voice was calmer, less passionate, but the anger was still there. "Not just here today, but in general: why I choose to live as a peaceful part of human society rather than to tear it down, why I haven't gone off to join Erik in his crusade to build a better world for our people, why I lead my students in defense of your kind and not against them? Do you think it's easy for me to champion the cause of the humans, Director, when I hear my students speak of the abuses and tortures they endure at the hands of your kind?"  
  
Fury did wonder, sometimes. Not that he would ever insult Xavier by expressing his suspicion out loud, but he   _was_   security-trained; paranoia was built into him. There was an ongoing file on Charles Xavier, frequently updated, which everyone at his clearance and above had read; one of the sub-headers was an ongoing circulating argument between three of the top head think tanks of the country (Fury included) about whether Charles Xavier could still be trusted, or whether they should activate the order to have him shot.  
  
Fury had always argued for trust. But sometimes, like now, he did wonder -- not whether Xavier was worthy of trust, but whether   _they_   were.  
  
"Why?" Fury said, and his voice sounded amazingly calm, under the circumstances.  
  
"I do this because I believe that we can build nothing on foundations of hatred and violence," Xavier  said. "I do this because I believe in giving humans not only a second chance, but a third, and a fourth, and however many chances it takes because in the end, reconciliation is the only true option. All other paths lead to no end, only an endless cycle of vengeance and pain. I'm not a hero, Fury, and I'm certainly not an Avenger. I'm not out for justice. I'm out for peace.  
  
"You and I both know about making the hard calls; and usually when people say they make the hard calls they are talking about deciding who will die." Xavier leaned across the table towards, him, his eyes bleak and his voice deadly serious. "But sometimes, the hard calls come in deciding who will   _live_ ;  those who will walk free under the open sun that you'd rather see dead or buried, those whose hand signed those papers and whose voice gave those orders. If the price for justice is too high, if claiming it will end in more chaos and retribution falling back on the heads of those under your car, then you must make your choice knowing that the voices of the slain call out for justice which you cannot answer.  
  
"Because they're dead, Director. You can't help them now no matter how much blood you spend. You can only help those who are still living." He paused for a moment, and then added in a slightly sharper voice, "And if you mean to do that, then you need to get your head out of your ass where this prisoner is concerned."  
  
Fury took a deep breath, inhaling slowly through his nostrils and blowing it out in a forceful exhalation. When he forced himself to step back from his feelings, he could see that some of what Xavier said was undeniably true. Regardless of what Loki did or didn't deserve, what it came down to was that they weren't allowed to kill him and couldn't hold him forever. Fury wasn't at all certain that Xavier's optimistic plans of rehabilitation and reconciliation _were_ options; there was too much hate and madness looking out of Loki's eyes for that.  
  
Fury didn't regret the actions they'd taken, he'd considered them necessary at the time and he still did now, but somehow he doubted the necessity of the actions would make Loki any more inclined to forgive them for the pain and indignities he'd suffered at their hands. Especially not because Fury wasn't sorry, couldn't _be_  sorry, couldn't separate himself from his own grudges no matter how many fine words Xavier threw at him.  
  
 _So what should I do?_   Fury thought, helpless and frustrated. He couldn't say it out loud, because that would be surrendering too much of his autonomy as director of SHIELD, to ask an outsider for instructions like a small child. He couldn't say it, but he thought it.  
  
Xavier gave him a grave nod. "I'll take responsibility for interviewing Loki, if you'll authorize that," he said. "I believe I am the one most qualified to tackle those mental blocks he's carrying, and I'm sure the results will be of great interest to both of us."  
  
"Sure." The word left Fury's lips a little stiffly, but there it was all the same. "You'll have access to whatever you need, and authority over the prisoner equal to mine." It was a fairly major concession, but it was also a relief -- shifting part of the burden of his crazy immortal pain in the neck to someone else, someone surely more capable of handling it than himself.  
  
"I'll need to return to my base of operations for a short time," Xavier said, turning towards the door. "I have some research I'd like to do, and some resources to tap into. In the meantime please make sure Loki gets a chance to rest. I'll be back later this evening and we can continue."  
  
"You're leaving?" Fury felt a stab of doubt. "What about that psychic hold-thingy you've got around his magic? Because without that, we won't have any choice but to restrain him again."  
  
"That won't be necessary," Xavier assured him. "The restrictions I placed on him are temporary, but they'll hold without my presence for a few hours. After twenty hours or so they'll start to unravel, but I should return well before then."  
  
"Huh," Fury thought, and frowned. "Couldn't you make them last longer than that?"  
  
Xavier returned a bland smile, and Fury scowled. He   _could,_   Fury realized, but he wouldn't; not if controlling Loki meant that Fury was required to keep letting Xavier back in. Xavier's smile turned to a chuckle. "I'm glad we came to an understanding," he said. He turned away from the conference table, tucking his notebook safely away, and started wheeling himself towards the corridor outside.  
  
"Professor..." Fury called out, just before Xavier passed through the door. He cleared his throat. "Those deaths -- they would never have occurred on my watch." It was a forlorn scrap of assurance, he knew, a meaningless hypothetical boast of feats he'd never have a chance to claim. That if he'd been there, that if he'd been the one calling the shots, he would have done better.  
  
Xavier turned to meet his eyes, and nodded once in the direction of Loki's cell. "And his would never have occurred on mine."  
  
With that, he turned and left.  
  



	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am so sorry about the long delay between updates. As I mentioned briefly in the notes to my last story, I got a new job. It's been a while since I had a full-time job and I'd forgotten what a drain it is on my creative energies. For a solid month I was a total brick when it came to being able to write things. Now, I'm starting to get my feet back under me, I hope.

  
Loki sprawled in the metal-framed chair, his hands bound by a length of metal chain that ran down to a bolt on the floor and back up again, and thought of elephants.  
  
The _spæmaðr,_ Charles Xavier, was here again; he returned time and time again, no matter what  measures Loki tried to ward him off. The first evening he'd come back, once Loki had eaten and drunk and had a little time to recover from the fits of delirium the horrid gag had brought on him, Loki had thought him a tool of Director Fury and determined to say nothing to him. He'd slouched in his chair, silent and sullen and glaring, and locked his teeth shut.  
  
He might have saved himself the effort. Xavier held up both ends of the conversation effortlessly, asking casual questions and then reaching into Loki's mind to pluck out the answers, as though Loki was an open book from which he might read aloud. Loki had flinched and snarled and scrambled to clear his mind,  only to find with some horror that it was almost impossible to _not_  think of things.  If someone told you to think a pink elephant, for example, it was almost impossible _not_  to think of one, no matter how hard you tried to push it from your mind.  
  
In the small hours of that night, however, he'd thought on a way to turn that very weakness to his advantage: the  way _not_  to think of something was to fill your mind with something _else_ instead. And so when Xavier came to his cell the next day and began to talk at him, friendly and personable and oh-so-insufferably _calm,_  Loki responded by calling into his mind the filthiest, most perverted sexual fantasy his mind could generate. If Xavier was going to insist on entering his mind like a voyeur, Loki thought, he could at least give him a _show._  
  
He'd expected anger, or at least shocked outrage, but instead Xavier reacted with no more than a raised eyebrow in Loki's direction. He redoubled his efforts, turning from thoughts of women he'd known and dreamt of in the past to more vile sexual acts, couplings with men, lewd perversions he'd never even had a chance to try in his long lifetime and only secretly imagined to himself in the dark hours.  
  
Xavier took it all in stride without a break to his equanimity, as though he were twice Loki's age and had seen so much in his life that nothing left could surprise him, although he did spare a snort and a dry comment on one or two of Loki's most fabulously unlikely flights of fancy.  
  
"I do work with teenagers, just so you know," Xavier advised him pleasantly.  
  
Once it became clear that sexual thoughts were not going to drive Xavier away -- although  they did at least succeed in the goal of stopping any further questions -- Loki turned in desperation to darker thoughts of cruelty and violence. He called to mind memories of past battlefields, screaming horrors that had flashed by him and that he had blocked away for the sake of his sanity. He confidently expected this to work. All the mortals -- with very definite exceptions, such as Fury or the red Widow woman -- were soft, tenderhearted, and Loki suspected that Xavier was even softer and more foolish than most. He must be, surely; he must be outright addled in the head if his moronic, wrong-headed _compassion_  extended to even such a creature as Loki.  
  
When memories of his brother's battlefields began to run thin, he filled in the gaps with his own dark dreams of power: dreams of crushing Midgard, breaking Asgard, forcing his family and all these foolish humans to bow before him. Fantasies of revenge on Fury, on all those who dared to hold him captive and take such liberties with his person; he drew over the details of his revenge with great vicious care, imagining the look of fear and awe on his face as the life bled from his body. Ugly flashing thoughts of overpowering Xavier himself, if only he were freed of these bindings, of dragging the broken man from his ridiculous metal chair and smashing him to the ground. Surely that would be enough to horrify and repulse Xavier, letting such evil fill his mind.  
  
But in the end, Xavier still sat before him unmoved, his expression calmly composed and his gaze unwavering. If that was a lie to conceal his true feelings, Loki had to admit, he was in the presence of the master.  
  
"Are you quite done?" Xavier asked him.  
  
 _Yes,_  Loki thought; he refused to say it out loud but he could not deny it in his own mind. Hours of furious concentration on such vile images left him feeling drained and exhausted, and much more shaken and sickened than he had expected. Clearly, this was not going to work.  
  
"Good," Xavier said. "There's really no need for this, Loki; I'm not trying to interrogate you. I only want to talk. You can ask me questions too, if you'd like; I'm sure there are things you'd like to know too, and I'd be happy to tell you."  
  
What an obvious, transparent lie that was. "I cannot imagine what petty doings of this mortal sphere would hold the slightest interest for me," Loki said, but a spark of interest had caught within him despite himself. Banal doings of worthless mortals they might be, but at least it would be _something_  to occupy his mind.  
  
Were he free of his bonds, Loki had little doubt that he could take the little human out: though not as strong as his kindred, Loki had the strength of the gods ( _monster!)_  and long, long years of training. That he could crush Xavier in  a physical fight was not even a contention. That he could beat him in a duel of spells or magic… well, assuming he was free to use his magic at all, Loki had no doubt that he would prevail.  
  
But Loki was not free, he was chained to the spot and helpless to defend himself against anything these wretched humans might do. Xavier was powerful, dangerous. He was a _spæmaðr,_  like Heimdall, one of the seeing ones -- and Heimdall was the only lord in Asgard, save Odin Allfather himself, that Loki ever truly feared.  Loki had to wonder if even Odin could match against Xavier in the arena of the mind, although it would certainly be an _interesting_  battle to watch. Loki knew of no other being in all the realms whose power approached him, except perhaps -- perhaps… Loki wasn't sure. For a fleeting moment he thought he knew, but then again it was gone.  
  
Such powers were -- such powers were terrifying. Loki knew. Such powers could rip and tear and _crush_  a defenseless mind, could -- could twist thoughts back on themselves until he knew not what was real and what was -- could _hurt_  him, more than anything else in the universe ever had --  
  
Charles Xavier could do that to him. There was nothing that Loki could do to stop him, and certainly no other would intercede on his behalf.  Fury would probably watch through his lifeless spy-windows and laugh all the while.  
  
Charles Xavier could destroy him, reduce him to nothing but a shell.  
  
And Loki did not understand why he did not.  
  
He couldn't stand this, having no defense, no recourse against the inevitable. If he could not flee, and he could not fight, then his only option was to try to charm his way out. Loki _could_  be charming, he knew, when he put his mind to it; could be personable and witty and sympathetic and debonair. Could project such an aura of wry friendly innocence that even those who knew him best, _should have known better_  still fell for it time after time. Dazzled by the surface, never once seeing through to the monster inside.

As much as he wished the  _spæmaðr_   would leave and take his terrifying, too-discerning magic with him, a part of Loki longed for conversation, for stimulation. It was not only thirst and hunger alone that had driven him into that terrible trance, nor even the unyielding _muzzle_  that cut into his lips and gums until the only taste he knew was that of his own blood. As much as any of those things it was sheer _boredom_  that had driven him to the point of hallucinations, the mind-numbing tedium of blank walls and barren cells with nowhere to go, nothing to do, and no one to speak to. The endless empty hours had fallen down on him like drips of water on his forehead, silently wearing away at his sanity around the edges. Loki's mind had always been quick, easily prone to restless boredom at the best of times; now, his unresting unrelieved thoughts beat against the blank walls around him until they threatened to drag him into raving madness.  

The hunger and thirst and pain were cured now, but the boredom remained. None of the SHIELD guards would respond to him at all save Fury, and Loki had absolutely no desire to talk to _him._ What good was it for his tongue to be loosed if he could not draw on his magic to escape? What good was it to be able to speak, to cajole and threaten and persuade his captors, if none of them would _listen?_    
  
But now he had a challenge, something that offered a respite from the endless grinding tedium of silence and enforced inactivity. Xavier was not like these other mortals, their minds weak and dull and their souls flat and magicless. Xavier was infuriating, Xavier was maddening, Xavier was… intriguing, full of contradictions. Human, and yet not. Passive and yielding in his manner, yet possessing a determination that could -- demonstrably -- outlast Loki's own stubbornness. Weak and crippled in body, yet unbelievably strong in mind. Loki knew the danger of trusting to appearances; he would not make the mistake of underestimating Charles Xavier more than once. To be in his presence was every moment a risk, but without the risk there could be no reward.  
  
Loki still had hopes -- in some silent, buried part of his mind, to be brought out and looked at only when he was alone -- that he could find some way to bend Xavier and his powers to his own will, to enlist his aid in escaping this place and planning his next campaign. But if he could not persuade him, then in order to escape from here Loki knew he would have to find a way to defeat him; and to do that he needed to know more.  
  
So Loki smiled, sweet and playful and just a little bit sheepish; the _Okay, you got me, good one_  smile he'd used to get himself out of far too many escapades in Asgard in ages past.  "But I do owe you a favor, it's true," he conceded. "You helped me with that most unpleasant business with the gag."  
  
Xavier's gaze on him was cool and thoughtful, and Loki turned up a few watts on the smile. He could do this, he _could_  do this. It would be harder to fool a _spæmaðr,_  but if Loki could not hide all of his thoughts behind obfuscating images, he could at least deflect them sometimes. So when his thoughts strayed to things he did not want Xavier to hear, he did not try to force them away, but instead filled his head with thoughts of elephants. How on earth had such a creature ever come into being? Whoever had come up with their concept, Loki decided, had a truly strange sense of humor.  
  
"So, Loki," Xavier said thoughtfully, and settled himself back with his hands laced together over his lap. There was a glass of water at his elbow (and another one at Loki's, and he tried not to feel too grateful for it when he knew Xavier could hear) which seemed to indicate they would be here for a while. "Tell me about your mother."  
  
Mother, _Frigga,_  golden honey-blond hair rippling from a long braid as she leaned down over him, her face in shadow but outlined in a halo of light. Soft hands and cool skirts and a soothing, murmuring voice and -- "I'm afraid I can't help you there," Loki said, in a tone of deliberately affected innocence. "I never knew my _mother_. Some Frost Giant slattern back on Jotunheim, I suppose."  
  
Xavier smiled. "Tell me about the woman who raised you, then," he said.  
  
Loki eyed him warily. "Why do you want to know?" he asked. What use could such knowledge possibly be to a mortal? Did they hope to plan some tactics, some strategic assault on Asgard? Should he stop them, or encourage them? But -- not _Frigga,_  no, there was no purpose to such a thing. It would tear out the heart of Asgard, leave Odin hollow, Thor wept and grieving... they would be weak then, unprepared for an assault... _no._  Loki fixed his thoughts firmly on the strangeness of elephants, their wickedly curving tusks, the grey wrinkled skin and long sinuous appendages.   _Elephants._  
  
"I find it's a good place to start when getting to know someone," Xavier answered. "At the beginning."  
  
Not an assault on Asgard, then; only on Loki himself. "You wish to know my weaknesses," he challenged.  
  
"And your strengths," Xavier said. "And everything in between."  
  


* * *

  
  
  
All that afternoon Xavier continued to ask him about Asgard, confusing and irrelevant trivialities that could bear no  strategic value, even if this batch of mortals could ever be fool enough to think they could oppose Asgard and somehow win. Instead, the shriveled little mortal rambled on about pointless topics of childhoods and memories, books and hobbies and favorite foods.  
  
It would not match his new strategy of pleasing cooperation if he wasted his energy deflecting such trivial sorties, so Loki allowed himself to be drawn into the topic despite himself. It was all meaningless, anyway, all lies; he had never belonged in Asgard, had never been a prince, never been Aesir at all. Nothing more than a Jotun cuckoo in fair fledgeling, part of a grotesque pantomime carried out by his mother and father as everyone in the household played along that he was a real child. It had all been no more than a lie, and so it meant nothing to him.  
  
Xavier spoke reminiscently of the house where he'd grown up, a rambling and gently-aging mansion somewhere in the hills of New England (whatever had happened to the old England, Loki wondered.) How when summer ended the chill would turn the leaves from green to gold and red and yellow, a profusion of treasure shimmering along the hillsides in the autumn wind.  
  
Loki hadn't been prepared for the answering surge of memories that swirled up within him in response, nor to the half-anguish, half-regret that accompanied them. Memories of walking in his mother's garden, the grass prickling and itchy under his skin. Frigga's private garden, it had been the cloistered retreat of the royal family when the princes were young; it had long since been remodeled, turned into another practice yard for the palace guard, the grass dug up and replaced with hard flagstones, and the trees pruned back to shadows of their former selves. Centuries gone.  
  
But in his mind it was still as it had been, the bright stones of the path and the jewel-colored leaves hanging before him almost close enough to touch. Thor had run ahead, shouting and laughing, and climbed in the trees; Loki had been too small to reach the lower branches, and he'd sulked at the injustice of it all until Frigga laughed and hugged him, pulled him into her lap and gave him cherries from her own plate. Loki couldn't remember any more whether they'd been his favorite food before then, or had become his favorite after that day, but for years the cherry tarts that the kitchens baked on Donnerstag afternoons had been the prime target of his and Thor's snitching expeditions.  
  
The memories leapt with agonizing clarity into Loki's mind, the star-spangled sky and the golden buildings and the time-frozen, picture-perfect people there, and Loki hated that he could not banish them from his mind as passionately as he hated Xavier for reminding him, as passionately as he hated Fury for binding him here.  
  
It perhaps shouldn't have been a surprise that after that particular conversation, when the spæmaðr had vanished for the evening meal and his little guard-puppets brought him food in a flimsy plastic tray, to find the evening meal accompanied by an offering of cherries.  
  
Foolishness. He knew what Xavier was trying to accomplish, just as he also knew that it wouldn't work. He was Loki Liesmith, Loki Raven-god, Loki Trickskin; he had hundreds of years old and a mountain of corpses under his feet. He did as he _pleased_. He was not to be tamed by choice morsels of food, not to be brought to heel and made to obey by simple, pitiful acts of kindness.  
  
( _How do you know?)_ the treacherous doubts in his head whispered. ( _Has anyone ever tried?)_  
  
If Xavier thought this would work on him, he was more of a fool than Loki ever imagined him to be.  
  
He ate the cherries anyway. Just to show them that he did what he pleased.  
  


* * *

  
  
  
"How old are you, Loki?"  
  
Loki cocked his head and frowned. It was a strange question; he couldn't offhand think of a way they could use that information against him.  "Why do you want to know?" he said suspiciously.  
  
Xavier smiled. "Perhaps I'm just curious," he said. "I'm a teacher, after all; it's a habit of my vocation to always want to place people in the right age group."  
  
Loki gave a dry laugh. "Rest assured I am far older than any of your students," he said. "In all likelihood, I am older than all of your students combined."  He didn't know the exact number in Midgard years, offhand -- conversions between Midgard and Asgard time could be tricky. He'd worked it out once, years ago when he'd been bored, but those calculations were far out of date by now. It had never been something he'd thought to need to know; never had he imagined being stranded here, amongst mortals.  
  
"I was more thinking developmental age than chronological age," Charles said mildly. "To the best of our knowledge, Aesir have all the same stages of life as humans -- childhood, adulthood, old age. Whereabouts are you in that progression?"  
  
"How should I compare?" Loki said irritably. "You mortals drop dead at forty years, do you not? Hardly enough time to measure."  
  
Xavier stifled laughter. "That's a bit out of date," he said. "There might have been a time when that was true, but with modern nutrition and medicine things aren't nearly so dire. In the United States, at least, the average lifespan is around eighty years."  
  
"That's hardly any longer," Loki snorted. What was Xavier getting at with this? Loki scowled at him, mind racing from one possible angle to the next. Unless Xavier thought to belittle him by implying he was still a callow youth incapable of defending himself?  
  
"We have a few different ways to measure adulthood," Xavier said casually. "At sixteen years old, you are allowed to drive your own vehicles; that's generally considered an important milestone. At eighteen you are eligible to join the army. And at twenty-one, you can legally drink alcohol. Though most people don't actually wait that long."  
  
That startled a laugh out of Loki, short-circuiting the building resentment. "So at this mark  of eighteen years your people can go off to war, but cannot yet drink in the company of men? Truly, Midgardians have strange priorities," he mused.  
  
Xavier chuckled in rueful agreement. "Twenty-one serves as the marker for a few other things, as well. At eighteen you can vote, but you can't hold political office until twenty-one. I suppose it's only fair, since it would be cruel to ask anyone to sit through endless Senatorial hearings without a promise of a stiff drink at the end."  
  
Loki's smile faded slightly as contemplation of Midgard's strange customs led inevitably to a comparison with home -- _Asgard,_  not home, how easily his treacherous thoughts betrayed that word. There were some similarities, he supposed. On Asgard a boy became a man when he had achieved his first great feat of strength, not at any arbitrary pre-determined date. But long tradition held that no Aesir could serve on the Althing, nor rule as a lord, until he had completed his second century of life.  
  
It had been that two hundredth birthday that Thor had recently passed, and the coronation had been set to mark the occasion, since Odin could not have passed the crown to him before then. Loki, of course, still had decades to go before he reached that all-important mark; technically, he'd been too young yet to take the throne. Yet another way that his own brief, disastrous kingship had broken all bounds of propriety and outraged the sensibilities of Asgard. If there had been anyone else who could have taken the throne during that interregnum, _anyone at all,_  Loki knew they would have passed him over. Again.  
  
Not that Odin would have ever allowed a _Jotun_  to sit upon Hliðskjálf, no matter how many centuries had passed him by. Loki swallowed black gall, and forced his attention back to the matter at hand, gratefully seizing on any excuse to escape his own thoughts. "I suppose by your standards, then, I would be perhaps nineteen or twenty of your own years."  
  
The words fell casually from his lips, but the silence that followed them was so sudden that a coin dropping would have been loud as a thunderbolt. Seized with a sudden uneasy suspicion, Loki glanced around at the faces of his captors, trying to pin down the sudden change of attitude.  "Why? What does it matter?" he demanded, bristling defensively.  
  
"Nothing you need to worry about, Loki," Xavier said, and although his expression was free of any overt humor, Loki was absolutely convinced that somehow, the little mortal was _laughing_  at him.  
  


* * *

  
  
  
"Let's talk about Thor," Xavier suggested, later that afternoon.  
  
And Loki had _known_  that this question was coming, because it was _always_  about Thor in the end. Everyone wanted to know about Thor, to talk about Thor, to be with Thor and pay attention to Thor -- he, Loki, was only ever an afterthought, a stepping-stone to the son of Odin who was _real,_  only ever considered as an annex to his arrogant stupid (golden) thickheaded musclebrained (perfect) fool of a _brother --_  
  
No one looked at Loki and saw Loki, no one. Not even this _spæmaðr_  whose sight was so keen, whose wits were so dangerous, who fought battles of the mind with powers of magic like _him._  Loki had thought maybe -- Loki had hoped maybe -- but no, never, never. Xavier hadn't even met Thor yet and already he liked him _better,_  he didn't care about Loki, why would anyone care about Loki when they could care about Thor instead, why why why why _why --_  
  
"Let's not," Loki forced out through clenched teeth, careful to enunciate his words through the storming howl of pain-rage-love-hate-guilt-envy- _shame_  in his mind.  
  
It mattered not what he said. He would be ignored, he was always ignored. _Hold your tongue. Know your place._  No one cared what he thought or felt. No one.  
  
"All right," Xavier said, quietly.  
  
And he didn't ask about Thor again.  
  


* * *

  
  
  
  
"Earlier, you said something about the conversions between Midgard and Asgard time being difficult," Xavier said. "Can you tell me more about that?"  
  
Loki frowned, rewinding the last hour's worth of conversation. "I am quite certain that I _said_  nothing of the sort," he said.  
  
Xavier smiled. "Thought it very loudly, then," he said. "But please, I'm curious. What do you mean?"  
  
Once again Loki was astounded by how little these humans understood about the universe and their own place in it.  
  
"I was a geneticist before I became a teacher," Xavier reminded him. "If you want to talk comparative astrophysics, look up Jane Foster."  
  
Loki rolled his eyes, leaned back in the hard metal chair and spread his hands as far apart as the chains would allow. "Time does not flow at the same speed across all the realms," he said. "It is slightly different on each of the realms, but the difference of Midgard to the others is the greatest. It is why your realm is commonly known as the abode of mortals, although many of the other races of the Nine do not live forever. But the much greater rate of years here on Midgard means that you humans seem to age and die  so much the faster."  
  
"How much faster?" Xavier wanted to know.  
  
"It is not exact," Loki felt obligated to warn him. "The sages tend to say that a mortal's life to that of an Aesir is that of nine times nine -- nine times as many years in our lives, which pass nine times faster on Midgard. But that is really just a literary convention. On average, it's closer like seven and a half."  
  
Xavier looked taken aback. "So you're saying that for every year on Asgard, almost ten years pass here on Earth?" he asked.  
  
"More or less," Loki said. "It is why Fath -- Odin always forbade us, as children, against getting too attached to any mortals. They would only die and leave us heartbroken. Strange to think that he should reverse his ruling, and actually _encourage_  Thor to befriend humans during his banishment here." His mouth twisted bleakly, as comparisons rose up unbidden. "But then, the rules somehow managed never to apply to Thor."  
  
Xavier was quiet for a moment, then prompted him, "You said that it was an average. Why an average?"  
  
"It is not constant," Loki said, relieved to be broken out of his bitterness to talk about more abstract matters. "Sometimes the difference is greater, sometimes it is less. It goes in cycles, and cycles within cycles, periods of time when our two realms are brought closer together and the time becomes more synchronized.  
  
"When the timeframes of two realms coincide, there tends to be war."  A small smile played about his lips as he remembered his history. The last great synchronization had occurred a hundred and fifty years ago, Asgard time, or over a millennium in Midgard time. The Jotnar had taken advantage of the nearly-synchronous timeframes to launch an assault on Midgard, and Asgard had found itself -- quite unusually -- able to respond in a timely manner. The war between gods and monsters that had raged back and forth over primitive Midgard had been enough to nearly split the fragile world apart.  
  
Loki had, of course, been just a baby then.  
  
"The rest of the time, when the streams move further apart, they tend to just ignore you for the most part," Loki said. "You should be just as grateful, really."  
  
"And what is it at now?" Charles asked with interest. "Moving closer together, or further apart? Should we expect war, or indifference?"  
  
"Indifference." Loki grimaced, trying not to feel the aching twinge in his chest at the thought of how he'd been abandoned here. The gulf between the two realms was at their widest, now. Loki knew it -- he'd been counting on it, counting on Asgard being too slow to mount a response to his doings here. He'd expected to have days, maybe weeks to mount his campaign and assert his control over Earth before Odin could send anyone to stop him.  
  
Instead, Thor had landed on the roof of his plane after barely a single day. He must have departed Asgard within the hour of Loki being spotted on Earth, and how had he convinced Odin to commit so much power so fast? Loki could only wish that it was anything to do with himself, not the Tessaract or the safety of these godsbedamned mortal _pets,_  that had fueled his urgency.  
  
What was keeping Thor now, Loki could only imagine. He'd been stuck stewing here in his own juices for three Midgardian weeks now, with nary a sound from his brother. No doubt, Loki thought bitterly, Thor would be quick enough to put in an appearance if he were somehow to escape from his bonds and rampage among the humans again, if he were to try to execute any of his so carefully laid plans -- _elephants._ Now was not the time to think of plans. Think instead of elephants.  
  
No doubt Thor and Odin found it convenient to simply forget about him -- out of sight, out of mind. No doubt there were many important affairs of Asgard to occupy Odin's mind; no doubt Thor found more satisfaction in roistering with his sycophants than to spare a thought for Loki. If he were to be dragged home in chains it would be such an embarrassment to Odin, a scandal to all of Asgard. No doubt it was easier to let him rot here, behind the sterile metal walls and stifling magical wards the mortals had built to contain him, to wither away under the flood of Midgardian years while they basked in the golden youth and glory of Asgard without him.  
  
No doubt.  
  
The mortal looked at him sorrowfully, but thankfully said nothing, no insipid words to try to convince him otherwise. And that, Loki thought, was as good as a confirmation.  
  


* * *

  
  
  
"You held the throne of Asgard for a time, didn't you? While Thor was banished?"  
  
Loki glanced uneasily at Xavier and then away, as though he could hide his thoughts if only he avoided eye contact. The little mortal looked so small and harmless sitting there, housed in that metal conveyance that compensated for his frailty. That was an illusion, though; the truth could be seen if you only looked at his eyes. Power in those eyes, dangerous, deadly.  
  
"Yes," Loki said. There was no reason to hide it. He had nothing to hide. He was the rightful king -- rightful -- rightful! "Odin slept. The succession fell to me."   _Why not me?_   _Odin_ _said, said I was born to be king. But no one wanted me, they only wanted Thor. To push me out of the way so that Thor could stand in glory once more. But he was banished, Odin banished him. Only a king could lift that sentence and why should I? What did I owe it to him, to any of them, to let Thor come back and push me aside so that he could finish leading the realm into ruin?_  
  
"And so you became king," Xavier mused. "Did it make you happy?"  
  
 _No._ It hadn't. Loki kept his mouth shut, lips pressed thin together, but the truth of it screamed across his mind. _No._ From the moment his hand had closed on Gungnir's haft to the moment he opened his fingers and let go, he had not known a moment's peace.  
  
He who sat on Hliðskjálf ruled over not only Asgard, but by extension held guardianship over all the Nine Realms. Asgard's King had no equal, no check upon his power; he had absolute power, indisputable authority. So it had been for thousands of years, yet it had taken Loki only two days to realize that absolute power existed only on sufferance of those who carried out the orders. There had been no one upon whom he could rely, in whom he could confide. Only his mother, and she one of those who had betrayed him.  
  
His kingship was a sham, a hollow mockery. His father's advisors  had treated him with barely veiled contempt; his brother's friends  with open hostility. No sooner had commands left his lips than  they had run to disobey them.  Even Heimdall, the great golden  guardian whose loyalty was (supposed to be) beyond question, had not hesitated to betray him.  When he returned to Asgard he would be revenged on them for such slights -- he would finish what the Destroyer had barely begun, rend them limb from limb and burn them to ashes -- _elephants, elephants,_  he thought frantically, trying to rein his murderous emotions back before Xavier sensed them.  
  
He'd sought to find a way to turn the people's favor towards them, to find a way to win their obedience if not their respect. It was not an uncommon occurrence in the history of Asgard that a new, untried king would break in his reign with a bloody war or two, to prove his strength and win the acclaim of his warrior people. With Thor's idiocy having brought war with Jotunheim to their doorstep, it was too good a possibility for him to pass up. With the Allfather laid low and Asgard's mightiest warrior cast out, it was a surety that Jotunheim would try to take advantage; it was a threat to the safety of the realm that could not be ignored.  
  
Yet Loki knew that he did not _dare_ to lead Asgard's army against Jotunheim. He feared to turn his back to them, shied away from issuing orders that he knew would not be obeyed. Even if he could compel them to follow him (why should he have to compel, persuade, enforce loyalty? why should it not be given him unasked, as it was always given thor? why why why was thor worthy of loyalty respect admiration love and he was not?) he would be expected to lead the charge. It was inevitable that in such a melee, he would once again be touched -- and exposed for the truth of what he was.  
  
Even if he avoided open war with the Jotun, was only a matter of time until he was found out. Already Thor's friends looked at him with such suspicion, such distrust. They had been with him in Jotunheim, one of them might have seen, seen the frost giant grab his arm and how he yet remained unhurt.  They would turn on him -- they would kill him the instant they realized, jotunn imposter cuckoo traitor _monster_...  
  
No one would speak for him, no one would defend him. Thor was gone and Odin slept; there was no protection on which he could call. The truth of being king, Loki realized, was that a king had no friends and no father. He was absolutely alone.  
  
Seated in the great golden throne, with the staff of absolute power in his hand, Loki had felt nothing more beside a hunted beast; fleeing from one cover to the next while the baying of hounds sounded all around him.  
  
"It doesn't sound like it was a terribly fulfilling experience for you," Xavier said dryly, and Loki glared at him. He might be defeated, bound and stripped of his freedom and his power, but he would not be made a _mock_  of by this crippled little mortal. He, Loki Mischief-Prince, was the one who inflicted such needling on the warriors of Asgard, puncturing their self-important egos with teasing barbs.  
  
The parallel was obvious and _not_  one he wished to think on too deeply.  
  
"So why did you do it?" Xavier prompted him.  
  
"Why what?" Loki snapped, mind still on Asgard, still caught in the vivid throes of those humiliating memories. Why had he become king? What choice had he? He'd never wanted the throne but he'd needed, _needed_ the chance to prove himself. He knew the moment the servant had held out the spear towards him that such an opportunity would never come again, whether by chance or manipulation.  Why had he sent the Destroyer? What else was he to have done, surrounded by traitors and oathbreakers who sought to ruin everything, _everything --_  
  
"Why did you want to be king on Midgard?" Xavier asked, and his voice was strangely soft, strangely gentle. Almost _compassionate,_  as though he were discussing some abstract, tragic drama and not the attempted conquest of his own _home._    
  
"Because I --" Loki stopped abruptly, the words cutting off as though by a falling blade. "Because --"  
  
The second attempt went no better than the first. The words, he'd lost the _words,_  they slithered and vanished out of his sight for all he tried to clutch at them. When he tried to pursue them it was though he'd run headfirst into a stone wall, leaving him stunned and stupid with the impact. He stared across at Xavier, helplessly mute.  
  
"As much as you were despised and distrusted on Asgard, you had to know it would be ten times worse on a conquered realm," Xavier continued relentlessly. "You had to know that the humans would not submit to you tamely, or else you would not have made such a show of force on your first arrival. Earth would never surrender to you, Loki, never. You had to realize that on some level. Why, then?"  
  
 _There is no throne,_  the mouthy little craftsman had told him. He'd known it, even then he'd known it to be true, but by then it was too late.  
  
 _Why, indeed?_  
  
Still he was speechless, bereft of words and answers, and now Loki was beginning to panic. Questions, they had questions for him and he could not _answer,_  they would surely hurt him now, bring pain pain _pain_ until they squeezed the answers from him in between his screams. But he could not answer, it wasn't that he refused, he could _not,_  and there would be no respite for him no escape no way out --  
  
"I nuh," Loki stuttered, his tongue feeling numb, his words slush-mouthed. "I d-d-duh --"  
  
He had to say _something,_  any lie, any words at all. The panic mounted, both from fear of what the humans might do to him if he did not and the unexpected terror of finding such a trap within his own mind. He forced his voice to work, pushed out the first and _only_  words that would come to him. "You will _kneel_ because you _must_ , you are -- you are lesser, you are _nothing,_  you are -- you are -- made to be ruled to be bound to bow and to -- scream in lightless squalor where all is lost in emptiness, to serve -- to serve --"  
  
He hardly even knew what he was saying, where these tumbled rush of words came from, but once he started he could not stop. They came boiling out of him from some fathomless place marked round with jagged crimson edges. "You exist only to _die_  to give up your worthless lives in flyspeck _glory_  at my coming, the wake of my passing crimson with the blood of allies and enemies alike, bones paving the path to the citadel under the howling sky where _she_ \--"  
  
"Do you hear yourself, Loki?" Xavier cut across the rush of words, his voice low and clear -- not heard through his voice, clogged with rushing white noise, but in his mind. "These are not your words, Loki. This is not you. Who speaks through you now? Who uses you as his avatar?"  
  
He could feel it now. After that first day -- when the _spæmaðr's_  magic had lain heavy as a suffocating blanket across his _seidh_ , trapping him here, exposed as a butterfly in a pin -- he had barely noticed Xavier's touch on his mind at all. Merely a tickle, a light brush against his thoughts that reminded him constantly to be wary. Now he could feel the mortal's power inside his head, pressing and pulling at something that _ached_. His jaw felt stiff, his tongue numb and leaden. "What... are you doing... to me?" he choked out, each word felt as though cut with his teeth from a wooden plank.  
  
"I'm trying to _help_  you, Loki. Work with me, let me help you."  
  
That was a _lie_. That was a filthy lie and Loki knew it, he should know, he was the expert on lies. No one tried to helped him, no one ever had, and no one would now that he was disgraced outcast defeated criminal despised failed failed _failedFAILED_ \--  
  
A scream burst from his throat, strangled and animal. No words,  he had no words, they had all been sealed away inside him, leaving him mute and silent and powerless to defend himself. What had he ever had to battle with, to bargain with, but his mind and his words? Without them, what would be left of him? Just a mute, hollow shell, to be stuffed and dressed up and paraded before a cruel audience in a dumb-show --  
  
He would not submit to that, he would not, he would not. Loki threw himself into mindless struggle, forgetting the cautious reserve told him it was no good, it was useless, there were too many enemies out there and they were too strong. His hands were chained, pinned to the floor. Pinned, like a hunted animal on a spear. He could neither reach nor escape his tormentors, he couldn't get out, he couldn't speak and couldn't fight and couldn't flee and --  
  
The pressure in his head grew to be too much, feeling like it would split him behind his eyes. Loki threw himself forward, slamming his forehead against the unyielding metal of the table in a desperate attempt to relieve it. There was a screeching noise as the metal bent and warped, lost in the static that spread across his skull in a strange white silence. Somewhere very distantly he could hear shouting, but that meant nothing to him; at least the cacophony inside his head was silenced.  
  
"I'm sorry," he heard Xavier saying, as if from a great distance. "I pushed too hard, too soon. We'll try again another time, when you're ready."  
  
Now, the mortal's voice whispered in his mind, clear as if spoken directly in his ear. The command was heavy with calm, silence, a promise of freedom from fear and relief from pain. _Sleep._  
  
Loki slept.  
  


* * *

  
  
The demigod -- or Frost giant, whatever the hell he was -- dropped so quickly it was almost insulting. One moment he'd been pitching  some kind of fit, throwing his weight against the chains like he'd been possessed -- even the titanium-adamantium alloy, Fury's pride and joy when it came to state-of-the-art technical developments, started to bend and twist under the strain. Fury barely had time to hit the big red panic button on his console and was halfway through a tersely-worded alarm that would send a dozen extra guards into the cell… for all the good they'd be able to do, anyway. The most he could hope for was to slow their prisoner down while Fury used his emergency channels to call some of his more high-powered allies into the fray, and then --  
  
Xavier hadn't even moved throughout their prisoner's explosion of fury. One moment Loki had been jerking around like a mad beast, and the next his eyes rolled back in his head and he slumped bonelessly over the table, his breathing evening out into the rhythms of deep sleep. The telepath hadn't even needed to _touch_  him.  
  
No wonder Xavier hadn't been particularly worried about Fury stationing guards in the cell, or out in the hallway. Fury was somewhere between impressed, and mildly outraged at how _easy_  it had been. Couldn't Xavier have seen fit to be on hand the first time their would-be mad dictator had tried to take over the Earth?  
  
However it had happened, Loki was unconscious now, and at Xavier's request Fury had his men carefully unhook him from the chair and take him back to his even-more-heavily-reinforced sleeping cell. It was clear there'd be no more interviews today, and Fury stood beside Xavier in the corridor and watched as his men carried Loki past them on a stretcher.  
  
New bruises bloomed on that pale skin, on his wrists where the manacles had bitten him, on his forehead where he'd slammed it into the table hard enough to crumple the reinforced steel. Fury eyed them with a deep doubt; he knew better than most how hard Loki was to damage, how hard it was to put even such marks as those on him. How desperate must Loki have been, to struggle so hard and so fruitlessly? They hadn't, as far as Fury could tell, been talking about anything that should have been so painful or difficult a topic. What could possibly have set him off so violently?  
  
"Are you starting to believe me now?" Xavier remarked from his elbow. "That someone has been tampering with his mind, and left ligatures on his memories that he cannot break."  
  
Instead of answering him, Fury deliberately turned his back to Xavier in order to watch the retreating progress of their prisoner down the corridor and away. He was starting to, a little bit. But lifelong habits of suspicion could not be so easily erased. "He could be faking it," he said distantly; not because he hoped to persuade Xavier to change his mind or even because he fully believed it himself, but because he knew Xavier would sense his doubts whether he spoke them aloud or not.  
  
It still made him feel better, to imagine that he had _some_  control over what Xavier heard from him.  
  
"He is not," Xavier assured him.  
  
"I have only your word that what you say is going on with him is the truth," Fury said, keeping his voice careful and controlled. It was a logical objection to make, he thought, a perfectly reasonable doubt.  
  
Somewhat to his relief, Xavier chuckled, apparently not offended by his suspicions. "That's true," he said. "And I'm afraid there aren't any other proofs I could offer; at least, none that you could accept. But you decided to trust me when you first brought me here, Director; it hardly makes sense for you to change your mind now."  
  
Fury nodded wordlessly, acknowledging the truth of Xavier's words even if he couldn't fully accept them. Couldn't put the careful doubts fully from his mind.  
  
"If it helps," Xavier offered him in a bright tone, sounding detached and clinical and almost _amused_  by the whole situation. "Think of it this way: if for some reason I wanted you to trust me, Director Fury, _you would."_  
  
And with that (un)reassuring thought, Xavier left him standing there in the corridor, staring after the unconscious form of the stricken god.  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Spæmaðr -- "a man who sees," a shaman or seer. It's not actually a historically accurate word; in Norse culture the role of seer was only ever taken on by women, the proper term for which is spækona. I created it by joining spæ (the root word for 'spy' in English) with -maðr, the male suffix (also seen in seiðmaðr, a male magician -- like Loki.) 
> 
> I wanted Loki to have a word for Charles other than 'mortal' or 'human,' one that would convey his respect for Charles' power and wariness at Charles' ability to see through his defenses. Since I really don't think the Aesir have a concept or word for 'telepath,' I decided to use this instead.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're back to Charles' POV here, and this chapter also focuses somewhat more on Charles' character than Loki's. Just a refresher, this version of the Charles Xavier character comes from the "First Class" movie-verse, wherein Mystique and Charles were foster siblings.

 

Despite his lingering doubts, the scene in Loki's cell that day did cause Fury to unbend a little bit. Perhaps because he was starting to wonder, against his will, whether Loki's guilt was as unassailable as they had first assumed (but more likely because Charles had so definitively demonstrated his ability to keep Loki under control if the alien made a break for it.) Either way, Fury at last consented to unchain Loki's hands during their interviews.

He felt Loki's sheer delight as the heavy manacles were removed, rubbing at his wrists with his hands and testing his new range of motion -- but when Loki raised his gaze to meet Charles', his expression smoothed back into blank wariness. Loki did not clearly remember the incident of the night before; his memories of the period just before unconsciousness were a vague blur, but it was clear that on some level he remembered Charles hurting him.

Charles could still see the mental blocks in his mind -- or at least, he could see where they were _not,_  unnatural patches of blankness bound to his psyche like white stitching against white leather. Charles had, in the course of his work with mutants and non-mutants alike, occasionally been compelled to put mental blocks over certain abilities or memories -- but never anything quite like this.  It revolted him, in a way that would be almost impossible to explain to a non-telepath, to see those incisions and stitches upon a living mind.

Loki was prevented from thinking clearly about anything connected with a _certain subject,_ with an inexorable, almost surgical precision. There was a chill, remote quality about the work that disturbed Charles deeply. Whoever had done this to him had been no amateur in manipulations of the mind, that was for certain -- and yet the faint traces of the work's author had an alien, almost mechanical feel to them. That he (or she) was not human was a given. That they might not even be _alive_   in a way that humans could understand seemed all too real, and disturbing, a possibility.

Charles' mistake the night before was to try to pry the blocks loose from Loki's mind with sheer force, accepting some minor discomfort and disorientation on Loki's part as a momentary inconvenience that would surely be outweighed by the relief of being free. But that had failed.

A living mind was a vital thing, always shifting and growing. In the same way skin could heal back over wires that had cut deep enough, Loki's thoughts and memories had rearranged themselves around the blockage in his mind. Already they were becoming embedded in his psyche, forming the foundation of how he viewed the world. He'd built upon them all new disarrays of hurt and resentment and the relentless frustrated hunger for vengeance for an injury he did not even remember.

The unknown puppetmaster had placed Loki in the role of conqueror and destroyer, and Loki had rebuilt his shattered sense of self around that role. Before he could remove the mental blocks, Charles would need to pick apart the convoluted mesh of thoughts and compulsions and grudges that formed his new identity. If he could find a way to bring Loki out of this villainous state of mind he'd mired himself in, then the rest would follow easily.

But the first step -- and, inevitably, the hardest -- would be to gain Loki's trust. He could do nothing without that, not without Loki fighting him at every turn. Loki was a bristling, defensive mass of paranoia and neuroses, snapping at any hand that extended near to him. But Charles was just as determined… and more experienced. And patient.

One step at a time.

"How bold of you, to let loose my hands in such tiny, confined quarters," Loki said softly, settling those hands crossed at the wrist on the table before him. His eyes bored into Charles, wary and calculating. "I might go mad again and lash out like a beast. I might strike you, kill you with a blow to your fragile neck before anyone could get near enough to stop me."

"I don't think that will happen," Charles said truthfully. Loki in his right mind would do no such thing, and Charles didn't intend to do anything that would provoke another irrational episode. He recognized the symptoms now, and would avoid them. He wouldn't give up at removing the blocks from Loki's mind -- not by any means -- but he'd learned from his mistakes. He'd have to find a more subtle approach.

"And what if it did?" Loki said, and his voice was carefully and deliberately pitched to reach the microphones. _There is no trust in this house,_   his thoughts flickered, forming and dissolving almost too rapidly for Charles to catch. _Separations -- differences -- schisms -- conflicts of loyalty, if I could find those cracks and work at them -- elephants, elephants, elephants…_

Whatever he'd been plotting derailed into a stream of colorful nonsense. Charles considered letting Loki know, in the interests of transparency, that he was really only wasting mental energy in such a pursuit. Charles was quite capable of reading beyond the surface level of a mind at any given time; a thought did not have to be fully formed and verbalized for him to see it and comprehend the meaning behind it. He was as aware of what Loki was deliberately not letting himself think as Loki himself.

On the other hand, whatever Loki's _intentions_   in deliberately screening his thoughts this way, the ultimate _effect_  was that he was slowly breaking himself out of the circular habits of angry, destructive thought that had grown to dominate his mental schema. That was an outcome Charles meant to encourage whenever possible, so he made a point of not calling Loki out when his mental soundtrack swerved towards and then away from an unpleasant or malicious place.

Loki continued. "Would Director Fury even try to stop me, I wonder? Or would he hold back his response _just_   long enough for the deed to be done? How convenient it would be for him, don't you think, if his two enemies struck out at each other, eliminating themselves with no effort needed from him. Tell me, Professor; do you think the humans would come to your aid? Or would they stand back and allow me to carry out your murder for them?"

As far as spreading dissension went, it wasn't a bad effort, Charles decided. Even if _he_   could read Loki's intentions (and the relentless projections of his own doubts onto others -- of course _Loki_   did not trust them, of course _Loki_   would prefer it if his adversaries fought each other,) Fury could not. But he refused to rise to Loki's bait, to treat his suggestions as though they had any credibility. Instead, he permitted a small smile to slip onto his face and said, carefully and evenly, "A better question, Loki, is whether _I_   would allow such a thing."

Loki looked away, discomforted.

Charles' earpiece buzzed insistently at him, and he sighed. He'd warned Fury to avoid talking on that channel as much as possible, since it was impossible to reduce the volume enough to keep Loki from overhearing it too. But this meant that he was wasting more time than he liked having to step out to speak with Fury to reassure him that _no,_   this didn't mark the dawn of a new plan of conquest. Fury really just needed to stop letting Loki get under his skin.

 

* * *

 

"So tell me," Loki said upon his return, "more about those humans like yourself." 

"You mean mutants?" Charles clarified, intrigued by the question. It was the first time Loki had taken the lead in any of their conversations, and the first time he'd expressed open interest in anything about Earth.

"Yes, yes." Loki waved one dismissive hand. "Whatever you choose to call yourselves. From the perspective of gods, of course, there is very little to choose between one mortal and another, but it seems to mean so much to you."

His nonchalant attitude belied the threads of anxiety slipping beneath his thoughts. _Unexpected masteries -- the _spæmaðr_  can not only hear secrets but induce paralysis, inflict pain, warp perceptions -- what else? I must find out. I am blindfold in this battle. I must learn more, find his weaknesses, find an angle._

"You speak of mutants as though they are distinct from other mortals," Loki continued. "How so?"

"Genetically speaking, they are," Charles answered. "Although the expression in each individual is unique, all mutants -- what we call _Homo superior_ , as opposed to _Homo sapiens_ which is the proper name for non-mutant humans -- share a modification on their DNA which we call the X-gene. The X-gene first appeared in what appeared to be spontaneous --"

Although Loki kept his expression attentive and serious, Charles caught a flash of boredom as his attention began to wander, and cut himself off with a smile and a headshake. "You'll have to excuse my pontification," he said. "This is my life's work, you know, so I do tend to ramble on if given an opportunity. I'm sure that given the proper background, you'd have no problem understanding the whole dissertation, but I wouldn't want to bore you."

"Not at all," Loki lied, and Charles let the polite fiction pass. "So you are saying that these -- Homo superior -- are an entirely separate species, then?"

"For a specific value of the word 'species,' yes," Charles said evenly. "Though most mutants so far have been born to normal human parents, and non-mutants can still have children with mutants. So the variation between the species is not too great." _Yet,_   he thought.

Loki waved this aside. "Most of the races of the Nine Realms can breed together," he said dismissively, "though not all with equal results, to be sure. I am more interested in learning more about these abilities that you say mutants have."

 _Fear,_   Charles caught a little of that, _if they are all so potent as you._ Cunning, ambition, _if I could build another army of these mutant mortals, what are their strengths?_   Wariness, _if I must fight them someday, what are their weaknesses?_ But also, beyond these thoughts, a bright spark of plain _curiosity._   That there was something in the universe so new, so fascinating, that yet he knew nothing of -- _unbearable_.

"There is a great deal of individual variation," Charles said to that spark of scholarly fascination. "Some enhanced abilities seem to be common -- strength greater than the average human being, for instance, or faster healing. Many mutants have some kind or another of direct external energetic manipulation, whether of light, or sound, or kinetic force -- how it's expressed seems to depend largely upon the individual's formative experiences. Some talents are more powerful than others, a few especially gifted individuals have more than one talent at once -- but that's rare."

 _Sparks of godhood,_   Loki thought. _Each individual has only one, like a single shattered fragment of a great spell, and yet if all combined together they might equal the power of a warrior of Asgard._

That was certainly a perspective that Charles didn't hear often, and he couldn't stop a faint smile at the sheer hubris evident in Loki's mindset. "Some of my most capable students have formed a team, what you might call a troubleshooting squad," he added blandly. "With their powers combined, they are quite formidable."

He expected Loki to bristle at the challenge, pull up the pride of his warrior culture in response, but to his surprise Loki didn't take the bait. Instead he leaned forward, his eyes intent. "They are sworn to your banner, this battalion of heroes?" he asked.   "Do the mutants have their own country, then? Are you their king?"

 _Powerful and wise, like Odin-king,_   Loki thought. _Yet also -- gentle. Kind._ Not _like Odin-king. How does a king manage to wield his authority, when crippled with such weakness? I must know. I must learn how…_

"No," Charles said, keeping his voice neutral. "I am not a king. At most I am a custodian, of my own small lands and those mutants who live under my care there. But there are many more mutants who live outside my boundaries, and mine is not the only faction."

Loki pounced on that, his eyes alight. "What different factions of mutants are there, then?" he asked.

Blast -- he hadn't meant to admit that. Charles concealed a wince, but answered as conservatively as he could. "I believe that mutants should, for the benefit of humanity as a whole, stay on peaceful terms with the parent race," he said. "That we should, as much as possible, remain unobtrusive and discreet. There are others who disagree."

"I would think that your people would be lords among men, compared to other mortals," Loki commented. _Powerful men like flattery,_   the calculation flickered in his mind, _they like to be reminded of the power they hold_.

"I'm afraid it's not quite like that," Charles said. "Mutants are feared and hated in most human societies."

"Whatever for?" Loki said in astonishment. "Really, almost any change would have to be an improvement."

"Mankind has always feared change, and hated that which was different," Charles said, as matter-of-fact as if he were discussing the weather. The earpiece he was wearing gave an unhappy buzz, but Charles ignored it this time. "There is another group of mutants -- led by Erik Lensherr, who calls himself Magneto -- which believes, not dissimilarly to you, that mutants are superior. That _Homo superior_   should rightly rule over normal humans, and seeks to lead his mutants to a victory over them."

" _Professor_ ," Fury's tinny voice came over the headset. He normally didn't interrupt during Charles' sessions with Loki, but he sounded distinctly agitated now. " _Can I ask what you're thinking giving information on radical mutant factions to the_ supervillain _who just tried to take over the Earth? Last thing we want to do is give him_ inspiration _._ " 

Charles pressed his lips together and shot back telepathically, _This is all publically available information. If he **were** free and looking to resume his activities, he could find this out in ten minutes of research. Hiding or lying information from him won't accomplish anything, nor will acting like Loki taking over the Earth is still a possibility._

Loki gave him a bland, innocent smile. He had, of course, heard every word that Fury had spoken over the channel. "He sounds like quite an inspirational figure, this Erik Lensherr," he said in a bright tone. "Perhaps I should look him up, once I retire from your kind hospitality."

Charles snorted and shook his head. "I can assure you, it would be a waste of both your time," he said dryly. "I once knew Erik quite well. To be quite honest, he's more than a bit of a racist; he would never ally himself with non-mutant humans, let alone an alien from another race entirely. In his own way he's a man of very strict principle, and he would never join forces with someone who did not seek to advance the mutant cause."

He was diverted to brood for a few moments on Erik, well aware of the irony of his own airy assurance as to Magneto's motives and methods. How could he claim to speak with any authority over what Erik would and wouldn't do in pursuit of his cause, when he'd lost any influence or restraint over the other man years ago?

It still hurt even after all this time, the way he'd failed with Erik. The more so because for all Charles had turned his thoughts a thousand times over each moment, each act, each link in the chain of tragedy… he still couldn't see any other way that it could have ended. Charles and Erik had shared the dream of a new world for mutants; how could he fault Erik for seeking that still?  He and Erik were so alike, and yet -- in the most critical of ways -- so alien to each other. Erik was so very, very convinced of the rightness of his cause, the justness of his methods. There was no way to dissuade him from his path, not without him becoming a wholly different man. And he had been a _good_ man, Charles had believed -- believed it still. How could such a good man have committed such terrible evil?

This time was different, Charles told himself firmly. This was _different_. Loki was not Erik, pure and ruthless in his quest for righteousness. Loki was just confused, twisted and hurt in his mind, lashing out in reaction to hurts he had received. There was nothing fundamental to Loki that demanded he unleash evil onto the world, only terrible mistakes. He just needed help, and Charles _would_ help him. This time it _would be_   different.

"Why, Professor, you wound me," Loki protested, laying one hand over his heart in a gesture of injured sincerity. "What makes you think I _don't_   have the best interest of mutants in mind? If my stewardship of Midgard had not been so cruelly nipped in the bud, I am sure that I would have had nothing but the highest regard for you and your people. I would have given them the highest stations among warriors, made them the gatekeepers for your realm."

It was an interesting bit of logic-twisting there, Charles noted. Loki wasn't exactly telling a _lie;_   since his conquest of Earth had never actually come about, he could claim any number of hypotheticals as if they would have been fact. He could even, at least for five minutes at a time, convince himself that his claims were completely true.

Not that it really mattered, since Charles wasn't the audience here -- Fury was. Loki had by now decided that he could neither deceive nor unnerve Charles, and instead focused all his sallies towards building mistrust between the two camps of his captors. He certainly had Fury nailed to rights, the deep-seated paranoia that pervaded the military man's every action. Whether Charles agreed to Loki's proposition or hotly denied it, the seeds of doubt would be planted.

So he laughed. "Very noble of you, Loki," he said with a chuckle. "But you'll forgive me if I don't intend to trust the intricacies of human-mutant relations with someone who didn't even know mutants _existed_ a few days ago. I will be content with the allies I have, thank you."

Loki sneered at him, slumping down in his chair with his arms crossed over his chest, the very picture of insouciant boredom. "Yes," he drawled. Playing for time while his mind raced, Charles sensed, seeking a new angle of attack. "Such _allies_   you have, when you yourself have admitted them to be enemies of all your own people. So very _good_ of you, Professor, to selflessly put your own safety and freedom on the line for the chance to _do their bidding_. What reward could they possibly offer you, I wonder, that would make it worth it?"

"I don't really do it for reward," Charles said calmly. For a teacher, getting to see your students bloom and grow was its own reward; it would have to be, in order to put up with all that came along with it. But that was not a sentiment he would expect Loki to understand, yet.

"Tell me, Professor, how do you do it?" Loki asked, leaning forward intently in his chair. " _Why_   do you do it? Why do you continue to aid the humans, after all this time? After all they have done to you and yours, all the struggles and humiliations; why do you allow them to keep you on the shelf, ignored and disregarded, until they have some use for you -- only to reverse their course and come to you, saying _of course_ we need you, need you for the skills that _only you_   possess, to clean up this mess of our own devising?

"Why do you, when you know that as soon as your usefulness to them is past you will be thrust once again into the shadows? Why do you help them, why do you not leave them to choke in their own impotence, why do you not return to them sevenfold the same cruelty and indifference that they heap upon you?"

There it was again, Charles reflected; Loki projecting his own issues onto others with furious intensity. And _projecting_   was exactly the word for it: even with his magic blocked, Loki's psychic strength was not inconsiderable. He generated a mental field that extended quite some distance beyond his own body, filled with a crackling silent litany of whatever was going through his head at the time.

Charles wondered if that wasn't the unexpected secret behind Loki's success as a liar, how he got people to believe his lies despite his reputation being widely known. Loki's mental field fed his intended falsehoods into his audience's mind before he even opened his mouth. Most people, lacking Charles' own sensitivity, would not be able to identify the source of the whispering doubts; they would creep in among their own thoughts as though born there naturally, and so when spoken aloud would seem all too plausible. He wondered if all Loki's people had the same ability or if it was unique, a part of his inherent magical abilities -- either way, he didn't seem to be consciously aware of it at all.

He also knew perfectly well that he wasn't even the real target of Loki's subtle attack here -- it was aimed at the other listeners, hidden behind the microphones and cameras. More of Loki's not-very-subtle campaign to spread dissension and doubts amongst his enemies, and even if Charles knew very well what he was up to, that was no guarantee that Fury did.

And so it was with both his audiences in mind that Charles chose his words very, very carefully when he answered.

"Because they are our family," he said, the idea stunning in its simplicity. "The humans are our kin. Our parents were normal, our grandparents, our aunts and uncles: most of us have sisters and brothers, cousins and friends who are human. Not all of them are estranged, not all of them have turned their backs on us, and so we can never turn our backs on them.

"No matter what else happens between humans and mutants, we will always be bound by ties of blood and kinship. We are the future of the human race, but they are its foundation: as much as it is folly for them to try to destroy their own future, we can never forget that it was they who brought us into this world."

And let that go on record, he thought, let that little clip go into the storage banks and be played and replayed and analyzed by top SHIELD operatives for the next five years. He had said nothing but the truth and the full sincerity of what he believed. If even one person watching that video would listen, then that alone would make this sojourn worth it.

 

* * *

 

Loki flinched pale and fell silent, then; his thoughts ran in a dozen directions at once, circling back and back on themselves. _Family -- not family -- chains of duty, chains of obligation -- just another stolen relic -- can never turn my back on -- why not, why not, did they not turn their backs on_ me?

In the end Charles called for a break, for the evening was wearing on and even if Loki could go many days without food without feeling it,  _he_   couldn't. The break also gave Loki time to settle his thoughts, to sort through the familiar self-perpetuating litany of resentment and pick a reaction.

The response that Loki did eventually come back with, however, surprised even Charles. He'd ignored the food brought to him in order to stare steadily at Charles the entire time. "You are wrong, you know," he said at last, breaking the silence.

Charles swallowed the last bite of his food, and pushed it aside in order to focus back on Loki. "Wrong about what?" he said.

"Blood and kinship." Loki tilted his head to one side, his brilliant green eyes searching Charles' face. Searching for a reaction, Charles knew, seeing how far he'd have to push to get one. "It is no more than human sentiment, after all; it means less than nothing among monsters. I slew him, Laufey, he who sired me, and I have never regretted it. I would have done more, if I could; I wanted to do more." _Kingslayer, kinslayer. There is nothing worse in all the Nine Realms than what I've become. You who value love and kinship so highly, do you despise me yet?_

That thought and memory went down and down, to the very core of Loki's despair. Charles hesitated for a moment, sensing a window of opportunity -- of shocked openness -- but not sure which line of thought to pursue. Two families and both of them so very, very broken, painted in lurid shades of anger and hate. But only one with love.

In the end he decided that the question of Loki's tumultuous relations with his adopted family could wait. They were a part and parcel of his problems, the frustrated rage that seethed endlessly beneath his skin, but -- there were things even more important than that. There could be no repairing of bridges upon such an unstable foundation; there could be no mending until Loki himself had mended, until he excised this poisonous self-hatred and became a whole person once more.

So he grasped the thought and followed it down, letting his awareness dip further into the seething currents of that alien mind. The memories bubbled close to the surface now, easy to see and reach and touch: a varicolored bridge, a dome of golden light. Power humming beneath his hands, the bullroar of force as the _bifrost_  bridge opened, cleaving a path to another realm.

 _Jotunheim._   The name rang with grim portent, conjuring images of cold blue dark and howling snow and wind. Jagged black stone, crumbling towers. Loathing thick on every corner. Hulking dark shadows, fiery red eyes promising pain and violence and death. _Snow. Wind. Ice. Blood._ Jotunheim, abode of monsters.

And then a crack of light split the sky as his hands slammed the _casket of ancient winters_   power source onto the pedestal, wove the conduits between two very different forms of magic that power might flow and flow and never stop. Iced lightning crackled outwards from the point of contact, twisting and twining like the branches of  _Yggdrasil_   the great tree made visible.

He glimpsed, down that open pathway, the destruction he had wrought -- a roar of thunder that did not fade but grew into a deafening cacophony, ground that trembled and shook and ripped apart like rotten cloth as the power _slammed_   into the realm that could not turn its face away from Asgard. Stone melting, ground cracking, a seething wave of dust and debris hurling outwards and he was _thrilled_   because his plan was _working,_   exalted in his moment of triumph as an entire world writhed in agony beneath his feet --

Charles' head rocked backwards as his eyes flew open. He took a deep breath, still half-expecting to smell the fierce ozone overflow of the open bridge.

Loki was watching him, his expression closed and his eyes stone-cold. As hard and dark and frozen as the crumbling edifice on the dying world.  _Now?_ he thought.  _Now that you know, will you hate me at last?_

"You tried to destroy them," Charles said, his voice numb with the impossible scale of it. " _All_   of them."

"I need not defend myself," Loki snapped, a lie obvious even to one without Charles' powers; his voice and posture vibrated with sullen defensiveness. "Our realms were at war. They breached the defenses of Asgard, sought to strike down the king while he slept." _Even if I baited them to it, what of it? It was still his choice, he chose treachery and he reaped the consequences._  

"I sought to end the war, quickly and decisively and with as little risk to my own people as possible," Loki went on. "Do not tell me you mortals would not seek the same. You would, you _did,_   your clever metal man sent an attack back through the portal that destroyed every living thing that it touched. I admire your ruthlessness, it was no less than deserved; but do not pretend to _me_   that you do not know what it is to kill your enemies."

Charles noted that Loki seemed to be missing some rather key facts as to how the battle of New York ended, but this did not seem like the time to fill him in. He shook his head. "Killing soldiers is one thing," he said. "Wiping out an entire _people_   is another. They didn't all choose to be part of your war."

 _You cannot destroy an entire_ race, _Loki!_   A voice rang faintly across the memory, high and clear as a bell. And his own response, both then and now: _why not?_   "Why not?" Loki asked aloud, voice chill and brittle. _Thor never did answer me; even he couldn't come up with one good reason why I should spare them. Can you?_

"You don't regret it," Charles said, fascinated despite his sickness at the concept. "You tried to commit genocide and you don't even feel guilty about it."

Loki inhaled sharply through his nose, and he raised his hands to place them carefully palm-down on the table as he leaned forward. "And why should I?" he said softly, dangerously. "Do you mortals feel _guilty_   when you put down a rampaging beast? Do you _regret_  inoculating your people with a cure against a deadly disease, even if doing so means that the disease will die out forever? Frost giants are no better, they are a _plague_  upon the realms. They know how to do nothing but kill and destroy, and spill out over the worlds they invade like a virus, devouring all in their path and remaking it in their own image. It is not _genocide,_   Professor, it is _pest control."_  

Loki flicked his gaze up towards the camera lenses overhead, a twisted pale smile on his face. "Can you imagine an entire realm of Lokis, Director?" he addressed the silent watcher, and although his voice was soft it carried across the distance perfectly. "A planet populated entirely by _villains,_   consumed with hatred for those who are better than themselves, who murder and destroy without a second thought?  They have tried before, you know, long Midgardian ages past. They would try again if they could. If I had disposed of them it would have been a service to you all. Really, you ought to be giving me a medal." He rocked back in his chair, a faint expression of bleak satisfaction on his face. "If you had ever come face to face with a Jotun, I assure you that you would not feel such _tender_ remorse on their behalf."

"I've met one," Charles corrected him. "And he doesn't seem so bad as all that."

"Yes, and I've been such a _stellar_   ambassador of my race," Loki snapped, clearly agitated by the reminder. "I destroyed and I killed, just like giants always do. What else could one _expect_   from a traitor cuckoo such as myself? I always, I always _knew --_ " He cut himself off, biting his words into silence with bled-white force, but Charles followed the thought without effort. _I always knew I was different, wrong in some way, and at last I finally know why. Trickster. Coward. Liar. Never wanted, never good enough for anyone.  I fought for them with the only weapons I had, with feint and deception and guile, because nothing I could do would ever be_ good enough _but to save the whole kingdom, make them safe forever. Because if I could kill all the monsters then maybe the monster inside me would die too._

"You are not a monster, Loki," Charles said. And it was true. Loki was a mess inside, it was true, and his hands were heavy with blood -- but he had known blood before, and everything about Loki's rage and pain and madness were familiar, all too familiar. There was nothing in Loki's mind and heart that he had not seen before in humans and mutants both -- nothing fundamentally unworthy, nothing beyond redemption.

Loki laughed, an ugly cut-off sound. "Oh, but I am," he said. He swept one hand across his chest, a mockery of a bow. "This skin is a lie, you know, a pretty disguise that lets me walk in secret among civilized folk. I have been lying to the world before I even knew how to speak, because that is what _I am._   If you saw what lies beneath this glamour, you would recoil in horror."  _And why not? Why not? I did._ _  
_

"Try me," Charles challenged him.

Silence hovered in the cell between them, breathless and daring. Loki's face had gone blank with shock, and his mind flitted chaotically between one thought and the next, unable to settle on one reaction. He did not know whether to laugh uproariously or rage in offense at Charles' presumption, to spurn his pity or to strike him down or -- there, hovering behind everything else, stifled and drowned but never quite extinguished. _Hope._

"Do not say I didn't warn you," Loki replied, and although his voice was icy it barely concealed a tremble. He inhaled deeply and pushed back in his chair as though trying to regain some distance between them. His eyes flicked to Charles and then away, shifting in and out of focus. "I will -- need some ice."

"Ice?" Charles' eyebrows lifted. Loki's thoughts were a seething mire, shifting rapidly between yearning and aggression and fear. A part of Loki wanted very, very badly to be seen and accepted; despite all his pushing, Charles hadn't expected the other man to call him on his bluff just yet. Not, of course, that he was bluffing. Given some of the students Charles had cared for over the years -- many of them now lifelong friends -- he very much doubted that there was any appearance Loki could put on that would shock him.

" _Yes,_   you blithering dunce, they're called _frost giants_   for a reason," Loki snapped, and his nervousness drove him to lash out, loading his speech with insults like he hadn't done for days. "Do you think this is something I habitually do for fun? I will require cold to trigger the transformation, if you can pull yourselves together enough to find your asses with both hands upon this ramshackle ruin of a floating castle."

Without taking his gaze from Loki -- although those green eyes avoided meeting his own, fixing instead on the lenses of the cameras in a staring contest with someone he couldn't even see -- Charles raised the headset he hadn't bothered wearing in hours and spoke into it. "Bring us some ice, please," he said into it. His own authority over Loki was equal to the director of SHIELD's, just like Fury had promised -- if he asked for ice, he would get ice.

Neither of them spoke in the minutes it took for the strange request to be filled; the door opened and a nervous black-clad agent scurried in with a container. She left it on Charles' side of the table, avoiding Loki's half of the room as much as possible, and withdrew as quickly as she'd come in.

Charles unstopped the plastic container, and a burst of dry white steam curled up from it -- dry ice, really? Had that really been easier to come by on this military base than the simpler kind? He slid it across the metal tabletop towards Loki. "Is there anything you need me to do?" he asked.

"I need you to cease your incessant prattling for a moment," Loki snapped. Every line of his body was tense and sharp, and his hands trembled slightly as he reached for the container. Hesitated, then plunged his hand within.

Charles felt no echoing shock of pain at the motion, though direct contact with dry ice would have burned a normal human. Loki pulled his hand back and opened both palms together upwards, wreathing his downcast face in the rising, bubbling steam as the ice sublimated in the warm room. But it did its work, drawing the heat from its surroundings as it expired, and Charles felt as well as saw the cold spread over Loki's hands and creep up his arms.

He hadn't actually known what to expect. He had looked briefly through Loki's mind and memories of the ill-fated journeys to dark Jotunheim, but the memory of the giants themselves was shrouded, occluded. Loki's mental picture of frost giants was as much emotion as it was fact, a distorted mass of dread and danger and dark loathing. Of Loki's own true form he had seen no images at all, no glimpses of his reflection in a mirror -- Loki had, it seemed, studiously avoided mirrors while in his other form. He caught only a memory of seeing his own hands, deformed and discolored, and the shock and grief and betrayal that had raced through him with realization of the _truth._

And so Charles thought he was ready for any Halloween-grade horrors, thought he had braced himself to let only calm and nonjudgmental acceptance show on his features. He hadn't _expected_   the burst of cerulean color that washed up Loki's hands and arms, crept under his coarse prison clothes to envelop his whole body. He hadn't _expected_   the faintly raised markings that traced delicate lines and whorls over Loki's skin, as exquisite as frost on a window. He hadn't prepared for eyes the color of vermillion, glancing up to check his reaction with a mixture of hostility and ill-concealed hope.

He hadn't expected to see his own childhood staring back at him from across the table.

"Oh," Charles said in a small voice.

Skin the color of a summer sky in the evening, patterns etched across the arms and chest and face. It could have been Raven sitting in the chair across from him, transported across the years and miles back to his side. Even the expression -- half sarcastic, half yearning -- was painfully familiar. How could two such different people, from such vastly different circumstances, bear such similar scars?

He'd stared too long; he'd let his self-control slip, let himself be knocked off-balance. Loki was already closing up again, pulling away from vulnerability, his outward expression going cold and blank even as shame and pain and bitter disappointment rose like a hot tide within him.  "Once again, the heroes of Midgard show their true colors of hypocrisy," he said icily. _He hates it, he hates the sight, anyone would, he's no different from the others at all._   "How easy it is to give proud speeches and boasts, and how difficult to actually live by such fine, empty words --"

"No," Charles interrupted him, and his voice had gone choked and breathless. "That's -- that's not what I meant. Not at all."

He raised one shaking hand to rub his numbed and tingling face, and felt cool wetness sweep over his cheeks and the back of his hand as the pressure moved the tears to fall. He hadn't even realized he'd been crying until that moment. Nor had Loki, apparently, for those red eyes widened in alarm. _He weeps, why does he weep?_   Loki's thoughts ran in a panic. _He was never afraid before, not for a moment! Surely this appearance cannot be as terrible as_ that?

It was, Charles thought in a distant way, the first time since he'd begun his captivity that Loki had stopped to actually think about what someone other than himself was feeling. It was a milestone, if only Charles had been in more of a state to appreciate it. "It's just that you remind me a great deal of someone I used to know," Charles managed to say, once he had his voice somewhat more under control. "Someone who was… very, very dear to me."

Loki hesitated, wavering on the brink between open vulnerability and defensive hospitality. Those startling eyes narrowed in a suspicious glare; it was very effective, in this form. "You _knew_   a frost giant?" he said incredulously.

Charles shook his head. "No," he said. "She was a mutant, like me, but her appearance was very much like yours. She was -- she was my sister."

Loki's head jerked back slightly, as though the word stung. "You had better come up with more believable lies, mortal," he growled.

"I have never lied to you, Loki," Charles said, and for a moment he regretted that although he could read the thoughts of others, Loki could not do the same to him. How could he teach trust? The best he could do was give him the truth, whole and unvarnished, and let Loki accept it if he could.

Another moment of agonized hesitation, and then Loki swallowed painfully. "How -- did this come about?" he asked. Accepting, at least for now, the truth of Charles' words.

"We weren't related by blood," Charles said. "We met when we were both children; she'd been turned out by her family and had nowhere else to go. It was… it was the first time I had ever met another mutant, someone like me, and I asked her to stay, to live with me in my home. My mother did not pay very close attention to minor details like the exact number of children she had at any given time, you see." After all these years there was no pain in that admission, only a dry acceptance. He'd found other families since then.

"She was... a shapeshifter, not unlike yourself. Most of the time she took care to look like a human, only letting her true skin show when it was safe, when we were somewhere alone and apart from everyone else. I encouraged her to hide, to keep her disguise on all the time. I didn't realize at the time just how much it chafed her, never allowed to be herself. I acted as if I was ashamed… no," Charles gave a painful, hoarse little laugh. Honesty, after all this time. "I _was_   ashamed of her true appearance. I did not see why she should want to look so strange and out of place, when she could choose instead to be _normal._ " Even when Raven's blue skin was as familiar to him as his own, he'd still been annoyed by it, on edge by the sense of danger it lent to be in the company of someone so obviously out of place. His own sister, and he couldn't even bear to be seen with her. He closed his eyes, letting the last of the tears fall, tears of old regret years and years gone.

"What became of her?" Loki asked softly, and Charles opened his eyes again.  Loki's gaze was trained steadily on his face, his attention hanging on Charles' story.  "Did she die?"

"No." Charles gave another hoarse, pained chuckle. "Thank God, no. She still lives. But do you remember the man I told you about earlier, the leader of the mutant faction other than mine?"

Loki nodded.

Charles took a deep breath. "There was a time when we were allies," he said, "when we worked together and fought together. He befriended her, she became attached to him… he was the first one to encourage her to wear her real skin around him, you see. He told her that her true self was beautiful, that she should not have to hide. When… when we quarreled, when Erik left to forge his own way for mutants in the world, she left with him.  She believed in his vision of the future more than she did in mine -- because his was of a world where she could walk freely and unafraid.

"I haven't seen her since that day." Not except for in pictures and security camera footage, gathered from the wreckage of a scene when _Mystique_   had blown through like a hurricane. She would not even use her name, the name of the childhood they had shared; she'd thrown it away. "We're enemies, now; if we ever did meet again, we would have to fight one another."

"I am sorry," Loki's voice was quiet, and he looked momentarily at a loss for what else to say. How long _had_   it been since he'd last been moved to comfort another living being? "For your loss. I'm sorry."

"I have always regretted…" It was hard to go on, to force the words out over the constriction squeezing his chest and choking his throat, but Charles pushed on. "Even if we are enemies now I have always wished that I could see her again, just to tell her that I was wrong. That she is beautiful, no matter what she looks like… and that she should be proud to be who and what she is, that she should never have to hide or be ashamed."

He raised his eyes back to meet Loki's, trying to convey all of his earnest sincerity and wish-to-help in his expression. "I very much think," he said hoarsely, "that your own family has the same regrets about you."

 _No._   The denial was firm and unshakeable, not allowing the faintest trace of doubt. _No, they don't, they never would._   It was not the same; the gap between Aesir and Jotunn was centuries-wide and filled with blood. Impassable, impossible. _But I wish -- I would have wanted --_ _if someone **had** to find me that day in the temple, if they couldn't just let me die in the snow -- if I was fated to go on living, to be found and stolen and raised in another realm far from my own -- I wish that it hadn't been Odin. If only instead it had been -- if only it could have been -- I wish it could have been you._

 

 

~to be continued.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So... long-term readers of my fic may be aware that I am usually very emotionally disconnected from my fics. I may think that this or that thing would be happy or sad, on an intellectual level, but I can't really know what sort of emotions it will actually invoke. Not until someone reads it and gives me their reactions do I know whether I've actually achieved the emotional impact I was going for.
> 
> So with that disclaimer... I *think* that this chapter has a lot of feels...?

  
  
Fury wasn't an idiot; he knew what Xavier was trying to do.  
  
It had been easy to hate Loki when they'd first brought him in, a spitting ball of defiance and hate. When all he ever had to say was cruel taunts and stinging insults, and every conversation was a battle to see who could one-up the other and get the last word; when he'd swaggered around in his fancy costume of leather and polished chrome like some Lord of the Rings set escapee, it was easier to think of him as a caricature, a cartoon villain.  
  
Xavier made it harder and harder not to see him as a person (if not a _human being,_  then certainly the next best thing.) It was deliberate and Fury knew it; all that business about the childhood stories, the favorite foods, the discussions of Loki's father and mother was in aid of making them see Loki as a real person. Someone who had a past and a history and a whole other life before this cell, who sometimes smiled and even laughed in a way that wasn't cruel mockery.  
  
That bombshell about Loki's age had been a low blow. As far as Fury himself was concerned, it didn't change anything; countries all over the world recruited children much younger than nineteen to do their dirty work, and when you were down in the wetwork of a dirty operation you couldn't afford to hold back your hand out of some misplaced notion of chivalry. But it had left its mark all the same, and Fury could see it in the reactions of his men and women, the new way they talked about Loki, walked around him, looked at him.    
  
Fury knew what Xavier was trying to do, but damn if it wasn't working, at least a little bit.  
  
There was a right way and a wrong way to get information, Fury knew. He'd had all the training, was aware of all the arguments; he knew plenty of experts that claimed that torture never worked, the information it produced was inherently unreliable. (As far as Fury was concerned, there was a time and a place when even unreliable information was better than none at all; at least it gave you a lead to work with.) He knew that it was -- in theory -- much better to form a bond with the subject, gain their trust, until they gradually came to confide in you of their own accord. It was not something Fury himself was particularly good at; that was why he employed Natasha Romanov, among others. He certainly would never have had the stomach -- let alone the patience -- to sit in the cell with the mass murderer of New York City and chat pleasantly as though they were friends.  
  
But there could be no denying that Xavier's method was getting results. They'd learned more from Loki in the last five days than in the month prior -- and more than they'd ever learned from Thor, for that matter, in the entire time they'd known him. Every word was diligently recorded, analyzed, and archived. Once again, Fury wished with frustrated  bitterness that he could have someone like Xavier on his team full-time: even without the cheating advantage of his telepathy, Xavier's interrogation skills were first-class.  
  
And what a difference Xavier's presence had effected! Their prisoner had gone from being a disheveled, infuriated, semi-lucid ball of rage and hate to this: lounging casually and at ease in the station chair, hands clasped loosely and unchained on the table between them, volunteering all manner of useful information in response to Fury's questions about Asgard.  
  
Of course, Fury didn't intend to trust Loki's answers as far as he could throw them -- Xavier himself still sat in the corner of the room, as quiet and still as though her were just part of the furniture, while Fury and Loki conversed. Still, Fury didn't miss the way Loki's eyes flitted frequently to the mutant in the corner, as if seeking his permission -- or reassurance -- after every question.  
  
"I need to know," Fury said, laying out his concerns as bluntly and honestly as he could bring himself to do in Loki's presence. "If there's another threat to Earth, Midgard or whatever you call it, what is the likelihood of Asgard stepping in?"  
  
Loki gave an insolent, insouciant shrug. "Let's just say, I wouldn't place a wager on it," he said, and his lips curved up in a blade-thin smile. "And I have been known to bet on some _very_  long odds in my time. You are but a primitive, scrabbling backwater when compared to Asgard. Why in the Nine do you think they would give a damn what happens to this benighted realm?"  
  
 _False,_  Xavier's voice whispered softly in the back of Fury's mind. It was still slightly unnerving, but they'd given up trying to find a headset system that Loki couldn't overhear. _Midgard is one of the Nine Realms which the king of Asgard is sworn by oath to defend. They have come in force to defend Earth before, and they will do so again if they possibly can._  
  
Fury scowled at Loki, wishing there was something he could do to wipe the smirk off his face. Unfortunately, one of the conditions to him being here, interviewing Loki -- and to Xavier volunteering to act as a lie detector -- was that Fury was not to call Loki out on his false answers. Xavier had insisted on it.  
  
"I am not insensible to your security concerns, Director," Xavier had told him earlier, when they'd been -- arguing was really the only word for it -- over this interview. "Ask your questions, and I'll confirm whether his answers are true or false. Either way, you'll get the information you're looking for. But this isn't an open license to harass or belabor him."  
  
"My agent informed me that Thor Odinson had made an oath to protect this world," Fury said. He didn't miss the way Loki tensed up at the mention of Thor, small lines tightening between his brows despite his attempts to hold onto his attitude of nonchalance. Thor was Loki's sore spot, without a doubt.  
  
"And you believed him?" Loki gave a brittle laugh, swinging to sit up straight in his chair. "I would not have expected such _childish_  naivete from one so worldly as you, director."  
  
"Our research indicates that an Asgardian's word is binding."  
  
"To another Aesir, perhaps." Loki's fingers flicked as though to brush the contention away. "But to a mere mortal, no man of Asgard would ever consider himself bound by such a paltry thing. You are beneath us, and we need not consider ourselves beholden to you."  
  
 _False,_  Xavier chimed in silently. _Mostly. An Asgardian's word_ is _considered binding if given to a human -- there are only a few other races that it's not. Including Frost Giants._  
  
Well, Asgardian-Frost Giant relations were not Fury's problem. Still, despite Xavier's admonition, Fury couldn't resist the opportunity to needle Loki a little bit. "If it's a choice between taking your word on the matter or taking his, Thor Odinson is a lot more credible on Earth right now. You're not exactly our favorite extraterrestrial around here right now."  
  
Loki drew back, his posture closing and his expression growing steadily more hostile. "I never aspired to be."  
  
Fury snorted. "No, really? You could have fooled us -- sure seemed like you came looking for praise and attention. Just a tip; generally speaking, we humans prefer people who fight to protect the Earth, instead of to destroy it --"  
  
He'd been trying to get a rise out of Loki, so maybe it shouldn't have surprised him as much as it did when Loki slammed his hands down on the table between them, leaving hand-shaped dents in the surface. His gaze was black with anger as he leveled it across the space between them. "I have done more to _protect_  this benighted world than Thor ever has!" he snarled.  
  
"What?" Fury's attention sharpened on Loki. "What is that supposed to mean?"  
  
Loki didn't respond. He slowly sank back into his chair, and his face grew blank and closed, retreating back into himself. It was a look Fury had seen before, and it inevitably signaled the end of Loki's always-limited cooperation.  "We are done here, Director," he rasped.  
  
With a growl, Fury shoved to his feet and took a few short steps to the door of the cell. The hydraulic doors were not, sadly, equipped to slam behind him. Once in the corridor Fury exhaled, pressing his fingers to the bridge of his nose to try to alleviate the headache pounding there. Xavier always urged him not to let Loki get to him like this, but _damn_  the little shit tried his patience.  
  
Speaking of the telepath. _I assume that last one was a lie, too?_  Fury thought, deliberately subvocalizing his thoughts and projecting them as loudly as he could in the way Xavier had suggested he do if he wanted to make himself 'heard.'  
  
For a long moment there was no response, long enough that Fury began to wonder if he'd done it wrong, or if Xavier simply wasn't looking. Just before he gave up waiting, Xavier's response came back, unexpected enough to leave Fury speechless.  
  
 _Actually,_ and Xavier's 'voice' was almost thoughtful, _as far as I can tell, that one was true._  
  


* * *

  
  
  
After Fury had gone, Loki paced round and round in his cell, his quick nervous steps doing little to dissipate his restless energy.  The interview of earlier, and its abrupt truncation, still lingered in his mind and made him uneasy. Why had he _said_  such a thing? He couldn't imagine. He'd long since shaken the childish need to one-up Thor in everything his brother did -- shaken the habit many years before it had ever crossed Thor's foolish mind that _protecting mortals_  was a thing he should do.  The snapped retort had come from some unconscious place in his brain, and it left him deeply shaken to realize himself so out of control of his own mind.  
  
The numbing mixture of exhausted shock and confused gratitude that had gripped him for days -- ever since Charles Xavier first appeared in his cell, swooping in like a Valkyrie to pluck him from the bloody battlefield of his own memories -- was finally fading. He was left once more to contemplate his own position, and his future, and what he saw made him uneasy.  
  
He had books, now, lining a small plastic shelf in his sleeping cell. Xavier had provided them, and now that he'd grasped the nature of the mortals' alphabet and the tempo of their written syntax his reading vocabulary was increasing exponentially. He was given three meals a day, which he was actually permitted to eat, and no more of the heavy spices that burned painfully on his tongue and in his stomach. Loki had never said a word of complaint -- he would not have admitted to such a weakness -- but Charles had known anyway.  The clothes they gave him, though drab and dull, were clean and sufficient for warmth and modesty. He was allowed to stand and walk and move freely -- but only within the confines of these rooms, and only when the _spæmaðr_ was in attendance.  
  
This -- this was not right. There ought to have been a dungeon, with chains and rats and dripping water down cold walls that flickered in guttering torchlight. He should have been kept caged like an animal in a pit, trapped in his own filth, given barely bread and water enough to keep his body alive. Loki had not enjoyed the ordeal of his captivity prior to Xavier's arrival, and did not exactly wish for it back -- but at least when those around him treated him like the despised criminal that he truly was, the world had made _sense._  
  
"Are you so soft to all your prisoners?" Loki asked scornfully, coming to the end of his circuit and turning at bay. "Does every condemned criminal get likewise treated to an extended stay at a luxury hostel?"  
  
Charles' eyebrows went up. "If this is your idea of luxury, then the answer is yes," he murmured. "There are standards of basic decency by which all civilized countries abide. But Loki, you aren't a condemned criminal."  
  
Loki rocked back on his heels, surprised by Xavier's assertion. "Am I not?" he challenged.  
  
"No. You haven't had a trial yet, or a sentencing. Until then, you are technically under our custody, but you are not a prisoner."  
  
This was so ludicrous, Loki let out a chuckle. "And what do you call the chains, then? These guards waiting on a hairs-breath for a chance to shoot? The muzzle that the good Director used to silence me?"  
  
"Precautions for our safety," Charles told him, and gave a faint smile. "And so, indirectly, for yours. Loki, you should know by now that we aren't seeking to make you suffer. But until we hear back from Asgard as to what they plan to do with you, your fate is still uncertain, and we cannot let you leave at will."  
  
Loki turned away, scoffing. "You need not wait for a judgment on high that will never come," he said. "Simply name your sentence and execute it, without all this muddling about. You know what I did. All the world knows. You, of all people, know what I _am._ "  
  
"Yes," Charles said; and although the word was an agreement, the tone of his voice made it clear that he drew far different conclusions from that knowledge than Loki did.  
  
"Why are you doing this?" Loki snapped, rounding on Charles as he sat watching from his chair in the corner. "Why do you insist on mollycoddling a prisoner that Asgard hasn't even bothered to disclaim responsibility for? _Why_ would you waste so much of your time and effort on someone so completely beyond all hope of redemption?"  
  
"I wouldn't," Charles replied.  
  
Loki's lips drew back, baring his teeth in the mockery of a smile. "Do you think you can _save_  me, Charles Xavier?" he said mockingly. The very idea left him shaken to the core, deeply touched and just as deeply frightened. "What sentimental foolishness has infected your brain. I _can't_  be saved, don't you understand that yet? I am not some feral beast that you can tame, nor a child to be coddled and corrected. I am a criminal, a villain, and as your Director is so fond of telling me, I left three thousand dead mortals in my wake to prove it. What more must I _do_  to prove that I am serious?"  
  
"You say you deserve punishment because of the things you've done," Charles said, "and you do these things to bring pain on yourself. Can't you see how circular that is? Where does it begin, Loki? Where does it end?"  
  
"It ends when you end me, no sooner or later," Loki said. "There is no other option. I will never be tamed, Professor, I will never be _safe."_  
  
"So you say with your words," Charles said. "But your heart tells me otherwise. You lack conviction."  
  
Loki gaped at him, stunned by the accidental repetition of the words that foolish doomed mortal had thrown at him on the Helicarrier weeks ago -- or was it an accident? _You lack conviction._ Had he pulled that from Loki's mind, somehow, or had Fury told him? "Why do you mortals keep on _saying_  that?" Loki demanded. "What is that even supposed to _mean?"_  
  
"It means that even you don't want to live in a world where you succeed," Charles told him brutally. "You seek to conquer, but you don't want to rule. You push people away, but you're terrified of being alone. You want to hurt your brother, but you would never know peace within yourself again if he were dead.  
  
"Your mind and your heart are at war within you. So long as you strive not towards what you desire, but only in mindless rejection of what you resent, a part of you will always be plotting to undermine yourself... and you will always, always fail."  
  
Loki stood,  his hands opening and clenching into fists. He controlled his breathing carefully, in through his nose, out through his mouth, because he could not, he _could not_  lose control of himself now. It was true, it had _always_  been true and he knew it, he knew it, he was destined to fail at everything he ever tried, heroism or villainy alike.  
  
"How do you know you would fail doing good?" Charles asked.  
  
"Don't you think I haven't tried?" Loki snapped at him. "I _did._  I tried so hard to be a hero -- I planned it so perfectly --" He'd practiced every detail, worked out every step of his plan. He'd practiced his lines in the mirror in his private chambers until he was sure he could say it without breaking -- ' _Your death comes at the hands of the son of Odin.'_  
  
"In my experience," Charles said wryly, "That sort of heroism isn't the sort of thing you can plan ahead of time. You can't generally arrange for crimes to happen that you can then thwart. It's a little more... spontaneous."  
  
Loki hissed. "If being a hero means never planning for anything, leaving your fate and those that you command to the whims of Fate, then _truly_ I was never cut out to be a hero."  He ought to have known, the only true heroes were those who fought with their fists and their heart, relying on their inherent goodness to see their will done. Only the villains were clever and cunning, hiding like cowards behind plots and plans that existed only for the hero to unravel. If a lifetime of tales of wicked sorcerers and brave warriors had taught him anything, it was that there was no praise for those who _thought_  their way to the end of a problem instead of smashing through it. No valor, no honor at all to be found in the clever and crafty ways. He ought to have known that from the start.  
  
And it had all gone wrong anyway, it had all gone wrong. Thor had appeared, and in just a few words smashed all of Loki's carefully plans into ruins. Loki had been doing good, he'd protected Odin and killed Laufey and he was defeating Jotunheim -- if Thor had foiled him that ought to make Thor the villain, but why did things never seem to work out that way? Just by appearing, just by _being_  Thor upstaged him, made _him_  the villain.  
  
 _Enough._ "So be it," he said aloud, feeling a bleak sort of satisfaction, a sort of finality in the words. "So be it then. Let all the realms be agreed that I am wicked through and through. If I cannot be a hero then I will _be_  a villain, the greatest foe that Asgard has ever faced. I will become the scourge of all Asgard, of all the realms; I will rend the sky from the earth if that's what it takes --" He choked it off, but the thought continued unbidden: _if that's what it takes to make them take me seriously, to respect me, to **see me.**_  
  
"I see you, Loki," Charles said gently.  
  
Loki said nothing, pressed his lips together so tightly they stung, as though he could still feel the bite of bright metal upon them. His traitorous eyes, too, pricked as though with needles, burned as though with coals; he closed them and pressed the palms of his hands against them, grinding the heels against his skull.  
  
"But I have to wonder, Loki," Charles continued after a moment, when Loki said nothing. "Are those really your only choices?"  
  
"What do you mean?" Loki said, and he was proud of himself for how even he made it come out.  
  
"You speak of being a hero, or being a villain, as though those were the only two options available," Charles said. "Are those two things really the only things in your life that you can imagine yourself to be?"  
  
Loki's eyes flew open, staring blindly off into space, rocked and unsteady by Charles' question. He said nothing.  
  
After a long silence, Charles went on. "You know, it's a funny thing," he said. "Working in the academic field, one thing I see happening a lot of with students who never really leave school.  They go from high school to college to graduate college, not following any dream or passion, but just because they're afraid to leave the system they know for a wider world which is strange and unfamiliar.  
  
"Don't get me wrong -- I love teaching, and I think there's no profession more noble, or more valuable. But most of these children don't really want to teach -- they simply fall into it by default. They've spent all their lives in a system, you see, where the only two roles available to them are that of student and teacher. And in the end, when they run out of roles they can take on as a student, they become teachers themselves -- not because they have any passion for it themselves, but because they simply don't know any other way to be."  
  
Charles paused, waiting for a reaction, or perhaps searching in Loki's thoughts for he knew not what -- he hardly even knew what to think to himself at such a bizarre monologue. "I wonder if things are not the same in Asgard," he said, "only with heroes and monsters instead of teachers and students. If all your life you've only been taught that those two roles are the only ones that matter, then you find yourself defaulted into one role or the other, even if the truth is that neither suit you at all."  
  
Loki tried to laugh. It came out as a choked sob. "You must be a fool," he said. "What other pursuit can you imagine for me?" _Me, the bringer of war and chaos? Me, the architect of nightmares, the mother of monsters, the avatar of death?_  
  
"With your powers and intellect? I can scarcely begin to imagine," Charles said. "This world is a vast place, with more things to go and do and learn than could ever be accomplished in a thousand lifetimes -- even yours, as long as it is. Are you interest in the study of languages, as you seem to have a special gift for?  There are thousands upon thousands you could seek out to study, including ancient languages lost to us mortals -- but not, perhaps, to you. If you care not for humans, what about other forms of life? You could travel the wilderness of every continent, to seek out new species of plants and animals to discover. Or if the wonders of Earth bore you, or if your study is one of magic which is not to be found on this world -- you have access to forms of travel and research that the academics here could only dream of, and centuries to hone your knowledge of the craft, to research higher forms of magic never before dreamed of in any realm.  
  
"Or, if you were to tire of learning, there is equally much that you might teach. -- I know that I lean a little bit too heavily on the student and teacher model of the world, but it is what _I_  know, and I am prone to my own biases as any other man. There is so much that we could learn from you, Loki, about the secrets of the universe and the realms we know nothing of.  If, once you leave this place, you find yourself with nowhere else to go, I would love to have you come to my own school, and there to speak with my own students -- to teach them what you know about loss and grief, and recovery, surviving and moving on. I think we would have much to learn from you, too."  
  
Loki shook his head, trying to bury himself in denial, but it was too late. Charles' words opened up whole new vistas in his head, bringing light to a tunnel of possibility that had narrowed down so far Loki hadn't even realized how dark his horizons had become. He felt as though his world had been rocked, tilted on its axis and left askew. Bindings at the very foundation of his mind felt loosened, old certainties come undone.  
  
Loki had filled his heart with ice, built it up within him on the revelation of his true heritage in cold, unfeeling waves. If he filled himself with ice then he could tell himself he no longer cared, no longer _wanted,_  no longer felt pain -- no longer felt anything. The ice was cracked and shattered now, and slipping dangerously around the edges -- but if the ice were to melt, then what would be left of Loki once it was gone?  
  
"No," he said unsteadily. "No, you're wrong... I can't be. These -- these things are for other people, not for me." Never for him, never ever. "I'm a monster. I am evil. I was born to be, destined to be. It's not -- not something I can choose, it is what I _am."_  
  
"No, Loki," Charles said implacably, and how Loki's heart skipped and stuttered in his chest at those words. "You are not.  
  
"One side effect of my position is that I have, over the years, been called to do battle against all manner of unpleasant beings who threatened the safety of my people or my world. I have looked into abysses far darker than nightmare, and I have seen true evil. I have seen true evil, and Loki, it is not in you."  
  
Loki closed his eyes, and felt the tears slip free, tracking down his cheeks. How long had it been since the last time he wept? It seemed he could hardly remember the feel of it. "I am a monster," he repeated in a whisper. Clinging to the one thing in his world that seemed certain.  
  
"You are a man," Charles corrected him gently. "A man like any other, with the potential for both good and evil. A man of both cleverness and learning, playful and curious, resolute and brave, who has endured incredible trials and come out the other side alive and whole where many would have broken.  
  
"You are lonely, and selfish in your aloneness; you are angry, and destructive in your rage. You have been hurt, and your pain makes you cruel. But these are things of circumstance, not of nature. You don't have to be this way, Loki. You are what your choices make you, no more and no less. Choose again, and change."  
  
It hurt, hearing those words. It hurt in a way that was both painful and cleansing, like washing the infection out of a deep wound. But as much as he wanted to believe them, to let himself think that someone, anyone, might think he was a person worth being -- at the same time he pushed them away with equal tenacity. It had felt too right, believing he was a monster. There were too many things in his life that had never made sense until that revelation, until everything clicked home at last. Why he'd always been different, why he'd always been outside. Why everything he'd tried to do had gone so wrong, because the villain was _meant_  to fail; if he was a monster, at least there was a _reason_  for it. Why slights and hurts he'd given to others had been punished so severely, and yet slights and hurts offered to him had been brushed off as though they didn't _matter_ , because what matter was an offense given to a monster?  
  
"If I am not... not a monster..." Loki said aloud, and his voice felt strained and heavy just getting out the words. "If I am not, then why... why did they..." He gestured towards his mouth, helpless and frustrated; even now, he couldn't say it. The dwarves had done their work too well, masterfully buried all testimony of their acts. Even years later, with all his mastery of magic, he could not force the words past his sealed-shut lips.  
  
Fortunately, he didn't need to. Charles could reach into his head, hear the words he could never speak; Charles had seen those terrible memories that had swallowed him on the first day the _spæmaðr_ had come to his cell. The mortal looked at him now with sympathy -- not _pity_ ,  he did not need pity,  he would not take it -- and a certain hard-edged interest. "You were never able to tell anyone about it?" Loki shook his head. "Why not?"  
  
He could not speak of the act itself, of the pain and the fire and the blood and the silver needle; but he could speak in generalities. He let out a dry laugh. "Dwarven spellcasting is excessively literal," he said. When the dwarves had sewn his lips, they had bound him never to speak of what had passed between them, and not even the greatest of mages could lift a geas laid upon himself. Others in Asgard could have, perhaps; but since he'd never been able to speak of it, he could not ask for their aid. Even if they would have granted it.  
  
"I was turned out of the fastness of Nidvallir and left to make my own way home, horseless and barefoot in the rocks and snow." He could still talk around the edges of it, it seemed. "It took me weeks to get home, and by the time I staggered into the great hall the wounds -- most of them -- had already healed."  
  
"Did no one call upon the dwarves themselves for an explanation of their mistreatment of you?" Charles wanted to know, a low note of anger in his voice.  
  
Loki laughed again, the sound as bitter as wormwood. "They said that I had given them insult, and been silenced for it," he said. "They _may_ have left out some of the details. But the official story was enough for the court, who took great merriment in the idea of Loki Lie-smith made mute."  
  
"You were barely more than a child at the time," Charles said, low and sad.  
  
Loki blinked; that was _not_  what he'd expected Xavier to say. Then his chin lifted in automatic pride. "I had seen battle, and killed my first enemies. I was a man in the eyes of Asgard." Except he hadn't been, had he? No true man would dabble in sorcery, nor wrap himself in deception. To the royal court he had only been a half-a-man, _ergi,_  less even than a woman -- he'd been burdened with the expectations of a warrior, but never granted the prestige of one, nor the protection.  
  
"You never even tried to get around the geas," Charles remarked. "You were clever enough to find a way, if you'd tried. Why didn't you?"  
  
He frowned. "I was a son of Odin, a prince of the realm." And in the end, it turned out he'd never been that either. "It would not have been seemly for me to whine like a child, nor to blub about hurts already healed." Even if anyone would have been inclined to listen. Try as he might, Loki couldn't think of anyone back then who would have cared to hear the true story; his mother's indifference, his father's distance, his brother's boastfulness. None of them would have cared, none of them ever listened.  
  
"I am listening, Loki," Charles reminded him.  
  
It was too much. It was too much, and it broke him -- where all the years of neglect and disdain, all the long months of pain and hardship had not. The unrelenting kindness of this one small mortal that he could not escape and could no longer deny spoke to him, to that small part of _himself_  that yearned for it like a plant to the light. The ice melted in a rush and Loki broke down, weeping.  
  
He fought against it, snarling through his tears even as he twisted one way or another, searching for an angle of view where he could hide his shame from the prying cameras he could never quite forget.  
  
"It is no shame," Charles' voice came to him, so damnably, _hatefully_  gentle.  
  
And Loki had been lied to all his life, from the moment he had first been a babe abandoned in a temple by one uncaring father to the next -- but he chose to believe, one last time, that what Charles said to him was the truth.  


* * *

  
  
"Would you like me to remove the block on your mind?" Charles offered at length, when the tears had run their course and Loki sat quietly, spent like the sky after a storm.  
  
"Can you?" Loki asked, startled. "I -- would not expect you had much skill with dwarven spell-crafting."  
  
"I do not," Charles admitted. "Nor with most kinds of magic in general. But however the binding was administered, I can now see its lingering effects in your mind. I believe I could loosen it, if you would allow me to try."  
  
For a moment Loki hesitated, waffling between hopefulness and suspicion. What good would it do him to be released from the geas of silence _now,_  after so many years, long past the point where he had anyone who would care about the truth? There was no explaining things to Thor, nor to his parents, not after all that had befallen them. That bridge was thoroughly shattered, and could never be rebuilt.  
  
And yet -- even if he never spoke of it to anyone for the rest of his long life, it would make a difference just knowing that he _could._  More than the physical pain and humiliation, it burned at him not to have command of himself, to be constrained by an outside force within his own mind. To be released from that, even in such a small and belated way, was an opportunity not lightly passed up.  
  
"All right," Loki allowed. "What do I need to do?"  
  
Charles pulled his chair up to the small metal table at which they had spent so many hours, so many words. He gestured to the chair opposite. "Sit," he said. "I will need to be able to touch you."  
  
Loki sat on the edge of the chair, holding himself tense and stiff as though in anticipation of a blow; but Charles only raised his hands and rested two fingers lightly on either side of his temples. A tingling hum filled the air between them, and the _spæmaðr_ closed his eyes. Loki did not, watching the other man carefully.  
  
The positioning was awkward -- Loki was taller than Charles, even sitting down, and the barrier of the table between them made the way the smaller man was forced to stretch upwards stiff and painful. "Stop -- wait," Loki said, and leaned back far enough to break the contact.  
  
Charles opened his eyes, and quirked a curious eyebrow at Loki. "Did that hurt?" he asked. "Uncomfortable?"  
  
Even now, after knowing Charles Xavier for over a week and sharing more of his inner self with him than anyone else in centuries, it still flooded Loki with a strange feeling in his chest to realize that Charles actually _cared_  whether he was in discomfort or pain. Perhaps it was time that he should return the favor of that regard. "Not for me," he said, and pushed himself out of the chair.  
  
He walked around the small metal table, and slid smoothly to one knee in front of Charles' strange wheeled device. It felt a little dissonant to be looking _up_  into his face for a change, but Loki could not bring himself to feel shame -- he had knelt before far worse men than Charles Xavier.  If he could kneel before Skadi, before Geirrod, before the Other, before --

_(Who? When?)_

(He'd forgotten.)

\-- even before Odin All-father, then he could certainly kneel to this man before him, mortal or no. 

  
"This should be more convenient, I think," Loki said, affecting a casual tone. Charles smiled at him, and raised his hands to lightly touch Loki's head once more.  
  
"Thank you," Charles added, as though in an afterthought, but the sincerity in his voice was perfectly real.  
  
Loki frowned; he didn't think the change in position had been that big of a deal. "For what?"  
  
"For the honor of your trust," Charles said softly, and Loki felt his face flame. Now, he _did_  close his eyes.  
  
The _spæmaðr's_ touch upon his mind was tingling and cool -- not painful or uncomfortable after all, but probing and invasive in a way that made Loki uneasy. It was an effort to hold himself open under that scrutiny, but Loki set himself to endure.

Brief nonsensical impressions flitted past him too quickly to stop and analyze, sudden surges of colors at the corner of his eye or tastes filling his mouth that could not really be there. When the first ghostly images began to form behind his eyelids, at first Loki disregarded them the same way -- until he realized they were not fanciful imagination, but memory.

  
Memories rushed past him like the outgoing tide, the subsidence of water that preceded the tidal bore. Falling through the void, the boundless no-place outside of space and time. Fighting against unseeable currents to try to regain solid land, reaching for the promise of light and air. Coming at last to the shattered stone archipelago where the Chitauri built and tunneled their hives, and crashing like a meteor upon the ground.  
  
They had taken him, and taken him for a spy, at first, and had not believed his protestations of innocence (how ludicrous it was, that the one time he should be telling the truth, he would not be believed, even by those who had no reason to know him.) They pressed him for answers more to their liking, and he had none to give.  
  
Then the pain began, and how the Silvertongue had danced then! weaving a tapestry of artful deceptions and tiny slivers of truth, of persuasion and guile and sly flattery. What fools they were, what arrogant fools, to believe that their unimaginative brutality could force out truth in the place of lies. How _naive,_  to imagine he would be any more honest only because he was pained. Loki ducked and weaved through their interrogations as though dancing upon hot iron, exhilarated and desperate, and at last -- at last -- won over some grudging semblance of trust. Convinced them, at last, that he could be of some use to them.  
  
The Other had taken him to their cold and desolate city under the twisting sky, paved with the bones of so many dead the architecture did not even bother to display their skulls in prominent triumph -- a dead enemy was not even worth the notice, here. Just another building material. And in that citadel, seated upon a rust-black throne, he saw --  
  
He saw --  
  
"Relax, Loki," Charles' voice broke in from an endless distance, soothing and steady. "I'm not trying to hurt you."  
  
"Then why does it hurt!" he cried out, like a child's outburst. It was all mixing together in his mind, the black sky and the white bones and the bright blue starburst and the cold, and the cold, ice blood snow Frost giant monster monster _monster_ deathdeathdeath, bone white skin and dark hair and eyes like stars, the edges ripped and torn and the picture overlain with the translucent red spray of blood --  
  
He'd forgotten who sent him here, the name and the face and even the _existence_  of the one who had raised him to be his dark champion and placed power in his hand and planted blue fire in his mind. He'd forgotten why had he come to Earth at all, he had forgotten it, he had _forgotten,_  all his careful plans and strategies and contingencies, could remember nothing at all of the reasoning behind the invasion of Earth except that _this was important_  and he could _not_ fail.  
  
But in the end, he had failed.  
  
"Who sent you here, Loki?" Charles pressed him, his voice echoing in Loki's mind as though they stood in a hollow cave. "Who was it that sealed you to silence?"  
  
The answer was there, just out of reach, but there was a barrier past which he couldn't see. He could _feel_  it creaking ominously, bent under all the pressure of his locked memories -- and Charles Xavier, forcing them remorselessly to the light.  
  
For a moment Loki did not know which will break first; the geas, or _him._  
  
There was a face. Coming towards him through the distance, rising up through a blank white (blue starfire sunburst blinding) fog towards him. Looming huge and implacable, like a mountain given to walk. Skin the color of drying blood, and eyes like dead stars --  
  
 _Is not the wake of my passing crimson with the blood of allies and enemies alike?_  
  
He's in love with Death, he's in love with Death, he'll kill everyone everyone everyone --  
  
 _You exist only to serve. Your life will be a paving-stone beneath my feet on my way to destiny -- and so, for now, you will live._  
  
"Just a precaution," that granite-grating voice said to him, chilling him down with dread (and the tiniest thrill of defiance, the knowledge kept secretly encysted in his heart, that in the end Loki would do what he thought best.) "To ensure that you remain focused on my task, and do not find yourself in the position of... reconsidering your loyalties."  
  
"My lord," his own voice, dripping with honeyed sincerity, "I would not _dream_  of betraying you."  
  
"Indeed," and the face loomed before him now, one hand clenched in a fist around the bright teardrop gem held within, sputtering with blue fire, "you will not dream of it."  
  
A bright spark _leapt_  from his hand to Loki's head, and he seized and fell with his limbs twitching and clawing at nothing as the blue sunfire wrapped in a band around his head and burrowed inwards, burning like nettles, twisting his thoughts and devouring his memories until he _forgot._  
  
Forgot _who._  Forgot _why._  
  
And he'd stumbled out of the Tesseract-bright portal half-blind and half-sick, and he had everything he'd wanted, he was free and home and held power in his hands again, and yet all he could remember was the sick certainty that this new freedom was nothing more than an insidious lie.  
  
Even now, he could remember the face but he could not remember the _name,_  could not speak it, aloud or even in his thoughts. Trapped inside his own skin, he could not fight and could not flee and could not speak --  
  
 _Your silver tongue is in need of tempering, Liesmith._  
  
The dwarves had wanted him silenced, and taken steps with their bright needles and coarse thread to make it so. But they were not the only ones who had done so, were they?  
  
 _Silver tongue turn to lead?_  
  
All who had known him --  
  
 _Know your place!_  
  
All his life --  
  
 _SILENCE!_  
  
Wished for nothing more than his silence --  
  
 _I am listening, Loki._  
  
He tore at the barrier, and it gave way with a suddenness that startled him. And on the far side, at last, he found his voice.  "I am Loki," he cried, in a voice that shook from the rafters. "And neither man nor God will silence me!"  
  
Abruptly the heat in the room was doused as though plunged into water; a wave of biting cold snapped out from him and expanded in a ring. All the glass panels in the windows shattered, despite how heavily they were reinforced, as the deathly cold touched the overheated surface. Metal warped and buckled, plastic cracked and curled -- but at the center of it, Loki and Xavier sat untouched.  
  
He could hear shouting, at the corner of his attention, the panicked footsteps and babbling voices that were the Director's useless guards. He ignored them as beneath him, instead slowly raising his eyes to meet Charles'.  
  
"His name is Thanos," Loki grated harshly. A slow, viscous liquid dripped from his nose, from the corners of his eyes, seeping from his ears into his hairline, but he ignored it. "He is coming, and when he comes to this world, death comes with him."

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Also, kudos to all of you who recognized the 'Wicked' shout-out in Loki's speech there. I feel that Loki and Elphaba would have a LOT in common... ;)


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Loki's original plan, as described in this chapter, was based in outline on Kadorienne's "Stolen Relics" (chapter 7) where Loki explains his own plan to the Avengers. I liked it so much I knew I wouldn't be able to avoid parallelling it when the time came for our Loki to spill his story.
> 
> (That's the important stuff out of the way; the unimportant rambling is at the end.)

  
Nick Fury was not, strictly speaking, a spy.

'Spy' by its very definition implied a certain level of furtiveness, of deception, of going far into enemy territory to gather information. Nowadays, Nick Fury had people to do that for him. But he had been, for many years, just such a spy; and even now that background shaped his world. Fury was a man to stand at the center of a glass dome with plate windows and digiscreens in every direction, keeping a complete and clear-eyed view of the world around him. Information was his meat and milk, his currency and his addiction. Information was his life's work.

That did not mean, however, that he always liked the taste of it. The worst days of his life had taught Nick Fury that the things most important to know were also the most unpleasant to hear.

"So explain it one more time, from the top," Fury said, placing his hands on the metal surface of the table and leaning over it. "What, exactly, is a 'titan'?"

It was a reflection of how things had changed in the last week, that Fury felt no more than the usual cold-edged caution at putting himself within arm's reach of an unbound, super-strong supervillain with a grudge against humanity in general and SHIELD -- in the person of Fury -- in particular. Loki himself looked unnervingly forbidding, with the streaks of dark blood still lingering under his eyes and the corners of his mouth where they'd been wiped away by a handkerchief.  But the hostilities seemed to have called off, for the moment; himself, Loki and Charles Xavier all circled the table in this impromptu conference to defend the Earth from a high-level threat of totally unknown provenance.

"He is a Titan," Loki said, as casually as though that could possibly be expected to mean something to them. "One of the Eternals, beings of godlike power. Thanos is more powerful than most, and," a peculiar bitter smile twisted the edges of his chapped and bloodied lips, "also quite, quite mad."

"So when you say 'beings of godlike power,' " Fury said. "Is that in the same way that you and Thor are supposed to be gods? 'Cause we managed to take _you_  out without too much trouble, as I recall."

Loki glared at him, a black look underscored with rings of dark bruising that made the look particularly ferocious. "Ignorant mortal fools," he said. "The Aesir are as they are, as they ever have been. If a few ignorant mortals in mud huts chose to name us gods, that is entirely your doing and not ours."

Even in the heat of the discussion, a part of Fury noted in passing that Loki still (unconsciously?) used _us_  when talking about the Aesir. The cameras were recording all this, Fury knew, diligently absorbing every word in detail. It was a good thing they were, since Fury was having trouble struggling past his disbelief to absorb more than one word in three of this.  
  
"Thanos is a being of another magnitude entirely," Loki went on. "Your mortals have no notion, no notion at all of how sheltered you really are. Did you imagine me to be the great evil of the universe, Fury, one of the things that go bump in the night? I am but a gentle nursery maid compared to what else is out there.

"The Titans built the realms, setting order to chaos and seeding wakened life on the worlds they fashioned. Thanos might have been their servant, once, but he long since betrayed life in favor of his fascination with death. He once had another name, I suppose, but it has long since been forgotten in the shadow of his great obsession. It was most likely this obsession, this fascination which drove him mad; for all he kills, he can never himself die, no matter how much he would wish to. They say he once fell into a pit of molten metal, and emerged from it no more than irritated by the heat. He can never meet his great lady face to face, so he sends others to her in his stead, a neverending stream of sacrifice.

"He studied death, manipulated it, sought to harness it, and at last his research culminated in the forging of the Infinity Gauntlet, an artifact of cosmic power. With the Gauntlet in his possession, Thanos was able in a matter of moments to destroy half of all living things in the universe."

Fury blinked, thrown off balance despite his intense focus by Loki's last declaration. He understood the words, but the impossibility of the statement, the sheer _scope_  of what Loki described seemed ludicrous. "You have got to be kidding me," he said, the words escaping without him quite meaning it. He looked over at Xavier for an appeal,  but the mutant seemed only intent on Loki's exposition.

Loki smiled grimly. "Thanks to the casting of a great temporal spell -- a working the magician gave his life to accomplish -- the deed was undone, and the combined forces of Thanos' enemies overwhelmed him moments later. The Gauntlet was taken from him, the Infinity Gems scattered, and Thanos banished to the far corner of the universe -- but not killed, for he could not be killed. And in exile he continued his path of unending slaughter.

"Thanos commands legions of armies, spreads his dominion over a dozen planets. The last world he waged war on, mere moments after he accepted their surrender from throne of his power, he ordered a strafing of the capital city that killed millions. He has no _interest_  in conquest, no desire to rule. He cares only for killing.  He is _in love_  with Death, in the most literal of ways; he imagines her to be a woman, and pays court to her with legions of brutal slaughter.

"You humans are so soft, so undefended. You let yourself breed into the billions, covering the globe, and yet barely a tiny fraction of you bear any military might at all," Loki said scathingly. _Warrior culture, right._  "When Thanos brings his army across, there will be no diplomacy, no bargaining. He has no interest in conquest, no care for ruling. He cares only for killing, and your quivering world will offer him no more interest than six billion test subjects for inventive new ways of dying."

"He bargained with _you,"_  was all Fury could think to say to that.

Loki twitched, and sat back as-if casually in his chair. "Ah, but I had something he wanted," he said smoothly.

"Which was?" Fury snapped.

Loki waved a hand. "The place of Thanos' exile is very far away, on a plane not entirely contiguous with this one. He could have gone on being no more than a shivery fairy tale to you lot of mortals, until -- " Loki's voice, which had been in the cadence of a storyteller, abruptly dropped into grim coldness. "Until one of you _foolish_  mortals tampered with things beyond your ken. The Tesseract was awoken, and its far vertices nudged the outer realms of unbounded space where Thanos' empire resides. It may aid your limited understanding to think of it as a tunnel, or a doorway -- one Thanos could see, even if he could not yet understand how to open it.

"And then who should turn up on his doorstep except... yours truly," Loki said, and he flashed a smile that for all it was wide, looked more than a little sickly. "A magician, and one with a special knowledge of secret doorways and hidden paths. He imposed upon me to travel the byway of the Tesseract, as he himself could not do, and seize the Tesseract, there to open the door from the other side and allow a few of his minions through. And the rest, well -- you know. Or think you do. The pathway remains, even if the gateway is closed. And on the other side of it, he waits."

There was a long silence in the little metal cell.

"You sicced this crazy motherfucker on _my planet,_ " Fury said flatly.

Loki rolled his eyes. "There's no need to act like this was _my_  fault," he defended himself. "Thanos and his own pet minions would have figured it out within a few years. I merely advanced the timetable."

On the other side of the table, Xavier stirred and frowned. But whatever he was thinking -- or Loki was thinking, which he overheard -- he didn't consider it important enough to interrupt.

"And you thought it was a good idea to sign on with him? Make yourself part of his little death crusades?" Fury demanded, disgust and disbelief oozing thick from his voice.

Temper flashed in Loki's furious green eyes. "Have you understood nothing of what I told you?" he snarled. "One does not leave Thanos' company before _he_  wills it, not through any means. My options were made clear enough: I would abide, or else I would be put to endless agony until my will broke, and I would abide anyway. I _chose_  to skip over the tedious middle parts, with all the writhing and screaming for the mercy of death, and come right to the inevitable conclusion. Hopefully with some semblance of my wits and agency still about me," Loki finished savagely. "You'll have to excuse that I'm not one of your _heroes_ , to volunteer for a few decades of helpless agony to no greater purpose."

Xavier learned forward, smoothly inserting himself into the roiling atmosphere of the cell, and spoke for the first time. "It's clear enough what you had to offer him," he said calmly, taking control of the conversation with little effort. "But what did he offer you in return?"

"Wine, women, gold?" Fury guessed coldly. "A chance to pay your brother back for whatever grudge-match you've got going? A pretty throne to sit on and lots of peons to tell you how great you are?"

"Clearly, you already know the circumstances so well," Loki bit off in return. "I wouldn't dare to suggest a correction."

"And what else?" Xavier asked, addressing Loki and ignoring Fury.  
  
He met Loki's gaze calmly, and those poisonous green eyes lost their fire, slid off him towards the ground. "Does it matter now?" he asked in a quieter tone.

"You might as well tell him," Xavier said, voice strangely gentle. "Or I will."

"Tell me what?" Fury demanded, more than a little put out to be out of the loop.

Loki said nothing. Xavier looked back over to Fury. "This region of space hosts a number of populated worlds in addition to our own," he said. "Once he established a foothold on Earth, Thanos could use it as a staging area to wage war on any other planets in the vicinity."

"But Earth was to be _mine,"_  Loki snarled, the words bursting out as though he could not help himself. _"He would not touch it."_

Understanding came to Fury at last. "You mean he promised to _spare_  Earth," he said.

Eyes still downcast, expression resentful, Loki nodded.  
  
Fury couldn't believe what he was hearing -- all his easy assumptions turned on their head. "Are you seriously telling me that you thought you had to conquer the village to save it?"

"You're welcome," Loki said through his teeth.  
  
And if there was one thing that could piss Fury off more than the idea of a narcisstic alien wannabe dictator trying to take over his planet, it was the idea of _two_  of them, haggling over Earth to see who would get first crack at it. As though the Earth already belonged to them, that they could decide its fate so offhandedly.

 _"Why?"_  Fury demanded stridently.

Loki's head came up again, his neck held proud and his mouth in a firm unyielding line. "Regardless of what Thor may have told you, I _was_  King of Asgard," he told them. "I took the same oaths he did, to protect and shield the Nine Realms from harm. That includes Midgard. I may have been betrayed -- cast unjustly from my throne -- but I still take my oaths seriously."

It made a sort of sense, Fury thought. If Loki's description of Thanos' genocidal habits was accurate -- and Loki at least seemed to believe that it was -- then he wouldn't leave much behind him for Loki to rule over. Couldn't get much tribute and adulation out of a pile of corpses, after all.

"And?" Xavier prodded, although Fury couldn't imagine what else he would have to say.

"And... Thor likes this realm," Loki muttered, almost inaudibly. "He is fond of you mortals, for all your backwards habits. It would -- grieve him, were it to come to harm."

Fury's mind very nearly shorted out at this, this twisted and backwards expression of -- of _brotherly affection,_  in all the least expected places and most bizarre forms.

"Besides," Loki said, a glint of his usual wicked humor returning to his eye. "I would get to rub in his face, that I succeeded where he failed -- that I protected Earth from a threat that he never could have hoped to."

"What, you    _protected_    Earth by unleashing an army of alien lizards in the middle of a major civilian population center?" Fury said bitingly. "I don't think much of your cunning plan."

"Oh, that was never    _my_    plan." Loki waved that away. "That was the Chitauri's idea -- they aren't much in the way of strategists. Overwhelming frontal assault against the greatest concentration of available warm bodies is about the limits of their tactical expertise."

"Then why'd you go along with it?" Charles wanted to know.

Loki's expression tightened, staring off into some unfathomable distance. "Believe me, if any alternative had presented itself, I would have taken it," he said. "For what they had done to me, I should have preferred something much more painful, much more lingering and horrific. But under the circumstances, I had to take what I could get. It was fitting enough, in its own limited way. They got they wanted, which was a glorious battle; and I got what I wanted, which was the whole lot of them dead."

It took a moment for Fury to sort out the implications behind that sentence, and when he did he had to grind his teeth against the throbbing vein in his temple. So the whole battle over New York, all the destruction and death, was no more than Loki playing two sets of enemies against each other for his own benefit? He should have let Clint Barton shoot him through the eye, after all.

"They were constantly clamoring for a battle, and so I gave them what they desired," Loki continued. "They had little understanding, and even less vision.    _My_    plan would never have come to combat at all. Thor and his stooges may throw themselves into such idiocy gladly, but I have never had a taste for such base wastage.

"I would have come through the portal, just as I did, and cried sanctuary. I would have carried the message of Thanos and his intentions to you, presented myself as a lost refugee fleeing from his wrath. I knew you had contact with Aesir before, and knew Asgard to be friendly to you -- with Thor out of the picture, unable to gainsay my account, I could easily have appeared to you as an ally, even a savior. And so I would have been.

"My expertise in sorcery is second to none, even in Asgard -- light-years beyond that which is available to you on Midgard. You would need every scrap of it if you hoped to stand against Thanos. I would have worked with your scientists, your heroes, your generals, to fashion weapons and tactics that would revolutionize your armies and bring you to a new era of strength, one that could rival even Asgard in military might. In time, I was sure, even the kings and magisters of this world would come to me for advice and knowledge."

Loki smiled slowly. "And one by one, in time, each of those generals and scientists would have come under my command; each retaining their place, their authority, but with loyalties answering only to me.  I would have no need to    _steal_    the Tesseract, for in time they would have brought it to me, and made me its keeper. It was belonged to my father, you know, before it was lost here upon Earth; I have a more rightful claim upon it than any of you.

"And then... I would win." Loki spread his empty hands, as if surrendering to the inevitable. "I would have Midgard to my hand. Victory against Thanos, while no guarantee, would have at least even odds. I would have proven to Thor that I could protect what he could not, and proven to my -- to Odin that I could be as good a king as he. I, Loki, answering to no one, would have gathered the all threads of Midgard's control in my hands." He met Fury's eyes. "I do not need a golden throne and a shiny staff, Director, to be king."

Fury's spine stiffened, chilled by the thought of how easily that plan could have succeeded -- no, not succeeded, he told himself firmly. For sure no single man could take over the entire Earth's government without anybody noticing, mind control or no mind control. _Right?_   It was only a question of how far the damage would have spread before it was contained. Three thousand dead and a few city blocks trashed suddenly seemed like much less to worry about, in comparison to what    _could_    have been.

In what was possibly the most severe tone of voice Fury had ever heard him use against Loki, Xavier asked, "I don't suppose it occurred to you at any point that you might have    _genuinely_    allied with us against the threat Thanos presented?"

"Not particularly, no," Loki admitted. He looked almost embarrassed. "All in Asgard know that you mortals are but babes at arms when it comes to warfare. When the Frost Giants invaded Midgard, you had little more to stand against them than flung stones and sharpened sticks. Even the last time I visited, a few of your centuries ago, you were still new enough to the concept of projectile weapons that you were still lining up in rows of brightly-colored uniforms to be shot."

"We've come a long way since the redcoat days," Fury said, restraining himself from pointing out that they'd    _beat_    the redcoats, and with a much smaller and poorly-equipped force to hand. Loki obviously had little ability (or interest) in distinguishing between one 'mortal' nation and another.  
  
Loki snorted. "Have you really?" he said. "Even now, you are divided among a hundred petty warlords, quarreling among yourselves. Conflict and strife divides you, paralyzes you. Your common soldiers are as no more than chaff before the reaper.  Even your elite team of chosen    _heroes_    could barely stop squabbling long enough to fight together against an _immediate_ threat."

"Funny, because I seem to remember them beating    _you_    pretty handily," Fury said. If Loki was going to be snide, he could be snide right back at him.

Loki glared at him. "Of course," he said scathingly. "With the mightiest heroes of two realms to call upon, with the cream of Midgard's technology and unlimited resources to draw on, in the crunch of the moment you managed to foil the plans of one lone man with a stick. Congratulations. Let us dearly hope you put up a better show against the next foe, who will not after all be coming to   _aid_    you."

And that, right there, was about all Fury could swallow from this guy. This alien who had come to Earth uninvited, dragging his cosmic threats and his grudgematches with them, and rampaged halfway across the world before they finally managed to put him away -- sitting coolly in a cell in _his own helicarrier_  and saying with a straight face that he'd come to _help._

Fury stood abruptly from the table, the metal chair scraping and grinding painfully against the floor, and whirled around to stalk out. He hadn't gotten this far in his life without knowing when it was time to absent himself from a situation before he did something they'd all really, _really_  regret.

 

* * *

 

 

All things considered, Charles was just as happy when Fury stalked out of the briefing and did not return. He could always review the security tapes later if he had questions that needed answering, but at least he wouldn't be able to give in to his compulsive need to trade stinging remarks with his information source.

Loki had been impressively cooperative and forthcoming so far, but there were some questions that he was not inclined to answer with Fury in the room.  
  
"I still don't understand why you chose the plan you did," Charles said quietly, keeping his posture and tone as nonaccusing as possible. Fury did provide an object lesson in how _not_  to get people to open up to you, that was for sure. "I can see how, with the memory blocks on your mind, you could no longer remember Thanos to warn us about him. How did you come to the course of action you chose, then?"

Loki hunched over slightly in his chair, as though weights settled upon his shoulders. He was silent for a long moment -- not refusing to answer so much as having no answer to give. "It was... like an actor," he began at last, awkwardly.  "Thrust on stage where he knows none of the lines, left to guess at the plot by the costumes and props. I had a weapon in my hand, and Fury stood there poised to fight." He let loose a ghastly chuckle. "I was ever a disappointment to my weapons tutors, but this much at least they did manage to drill into me: when you find yourself in a battle with a foe before you, you _fight,_  you do not wait for him to make the first move. He who hesitates is slain. It was a reflex action, that was all."

That was not the complete truth, Charles could sense in him. Even then Loki had been angry, and lashed out in his anger, caring little if the ones on the receiving end of his wrath were not those who had incited it in the first place. Such an explosion of violence was usually not very discerning as to its targets, and Charles spared a moment of pity for Fury having been caught in the path of it.

"And after that?" Charles prompted him gently.

"I don't know. It is all a blur. After Thanos... after he..." Loki groped for an appropriate word, and found one. "Despoiled my mind -- after he shackled my memories, hobbled my wits -- I was left with only a few distorted fragments of my original plan. I tried to make sense of where I was, what I was doing, what enemies surrounded me..." His brow pinched. "It was all in pieces. I knew that I needed to make contacts within SHIELD, but not who. I knew I had to let myself be captured, but not why. I knew that I must draw together Earth's strongest defenders and spur them to action against a monstrous threat --"  
  
He bit out a humorless laugh. "But without the memory of my true enemy, I had no notion as to what that threat could have been, besides myself."

He seemed to have more to say, and Charles waited. At length Loki continued. "It seemed like all my life had been leading to such a moment -- when I became the monster in the stories. The norns had placed my feet on the path... all prophecies come true eventually, you know, however you strive to avoid them. There seemed little point in fighting my own destiny. At least it was a role that I understood, to play the villain, and I played it _well._ " There was a note of pride in his voice, however inexplicable; the desire to succeed at something, anything, rather than continuing only to fail at everything.  
  
"Like any proper monster does, I invaded and pillaged. I destroyed, I killed, and I sought out heroes whose purpose it would be to oppose me. I gave them enough hints as to my own plans, my own weaknesses, that they could not miss if they were clever enough."

"After that," he said, so quietly that Charles would have had to strain to understand him if he hadn't been broadcasting the despairing thoughts at the same time. "I simply waited for someone to... stop me."

 _To stop me,_  his thoughts whispered, and there was a flash of a jagged rainbow bridge, the end of a shining gold spear, and a sickeningly long fall, _to end me._

Charles spent a long time asking easier, though no less necessary, questions about Thanos' capabilities and his forces, making notes as he went. Fury could get them later off the monitors, he knew, but he had his own records to keep.

At last, though, a glance at his watch confirmed the story his growing fatigue already told; it was getting late. "Why don't we wrap things up for the night?" he asked Loki, whose neck was also beginning to droop; the advantages of his greater constitution were set off by the disadvantages of having had his mind nearly ripped open earlier in the day. Fortunately, he healed quickly -- and the more so with Charles' own aid -- but it had clearly taken a lot out of him.

"Very well," Loki acknowledged magnanimously. "I shall see you again on the morrow."

Charles shook his head as he tucked the notebook. "I'm afraid not tomorrow, Loki," he said, bracing himself for the surge of shock and incredulous fear that met his words. "I will return the day after."

Loki kept his expression impressively bland, but there was no way Charles could miss the riot of tangled thoughts that burst through his mind at those words. _He's leaving -- he doesn't want to see me again -- no no no don't go -- cold and lonely -- now that he got what he wants, he doesn't need me any more_ \-- all rolled up under a sharp heavy hurt in his chest that said: _abandoned_.

Charles couldn't help the sigh, the sorrowful breath. "Loki, I've never lied to you, and I'm not lying now," he said seriously. "I will return the day after tomorrow. I promise this. The only things that could stop me would be an emergency that absolutely required my presence -- an attack on or by mutants, or a greater threat to this world. I don't deny it could happen. Though I never meant to, I have over the years acquired a small number of enemies --"

Loki scoffed. "More fools, they," he said.

Charles smiled. "So yes, it's possible that I will not be able to return the day after tomorrow. But even if that happens, it won't be because I didn't want to."

Loki looked away, his face stiff but his mouth tight. It would take more than a few words of reassurance, Charles knew, to lift that freezing hurting fear from his chest.  
  
"I am responsible for a great many people," he told Loki, "including, as I told you once before, a team of my students who work very hard to keep this world safe. I must let them know all I have learned from you, to begin preparing for the new threat."

Charles didn't touch people very often. His position as a figure of authority kept him somewhat aloof, and many people were made uncomfortable by either his mutation or his handicap. His physical contact with Loki since they had met had been limited to only two occasions, both when he had been trying to establish a deeper mental connection.

He touched Loki now, a hand on his shoulder where it met the neck. "You have endured much, to bring us this warning," he said firmly. "The very least I owe you is to treat this with the seriousness it deserves."

It was manipulative, Charles wouldn't deny it. He'd worked hard over the past week to bring Loki out of a feeling of opposition with Earth, and with humans -- to lead him into the mindset that they were on the same side, or could be. If he could make Loki feel appreciated, useful... if he could make Loki feel like Earth owed him their gratitude, he would be more likely to stay his hand in the future.

It was manipulative. But it was also true.

Loki's eyes filled and he blinked rapidly, even as a rush of complicated emotions and half-coherent thoughts flickered through his mind. "Thank you," was all he said, barely audible.

Charles squeezed harder, conveying all his concern and fondness through the channel and touch, and then let his hand drop. He didn't like leaving Loki in such a vulnerable state -- but he had responsibilities he must redeem to others, as well.  The only way he could prove to Loki that he would come back was to do it, to prove that he was as good as his word.

 

* * *

 

 

The next day was one that Fury referred sarcastically to as 'a day of rest;' the first day since he'd called Charles Xavier that the mutant hadn't made the visit to the Helicarrier. It was also, incidentally, exactly twenty-eight days after the battle of New York, and there was a parallel in there to a certain post-apocalyptic zombie movie that kept running through Fury's mind.

Naturally, that meant it was the day they finally got a call from Thor.

Well, technically it was a call from Jane Foster, but it was the one they'd been waiting for. For the past month Jane had been running modulations on their home-built Einstein-Rosen generator from her SHIELD-funded lab out in Appalachia. The location represented a compromise between being far enough out in the middle of nowhere to satisfy the needs of both safety and security, and also close enough to the Eastern Seaboard that both SHIELD and the Avengers' mansion could get there in short order.

Now, it seemed, they'd finally made a connection. That was the good news.

Until Foster had insisted that she needed to be in Loki's presence to finalize the signal.

That was the bad news.

Foster hadn't been brought up to date on all the details of the Loki incident, particularly the part where he'd made personal threats against her. Without that, it was difficult to convey exactly what a bad idea it would be to put them in the same room. But Foster insisted, going on about something something calibration something energetic resonance; _she_ was adamant that this audience couldn't be done without their resident alien sorcerer present. And unlike Stark, who Fury could almost always be counting on to be bullshitting him to _some_  extent, Foster seemed painfully straightforward -- honest, trustworthy, and incapable of imagining that anyone else in the world could be less so.

And so, begrudgingly, Fury agreed, and arranged transport for himself, his prisoner, and a platoon of guards to Appalachia. Didn't it just figure that the one day he could really, really have used Xavier present to ride herd on Loki, he was absent and incommunicado. They couldn't wait for him; Foster had insisted that they had only a short window to punch this signal through, measured in a scale of hours.

Loki was cooperative, though, almost suspiciously so; so much to the point that Fury suspected this was all a trick to get into Foster's presence before grabbing her and using her as a hostage, or possibly a chew toy. It was with this hair-raising vision in mind that Fury brought along the titanium-adamantium alloy chains they'd used to restrain him during the first half of his captivity. Fury personally oversaw the manacles being put on Loki's wrist, the chains secured to a restraining bolt giving him less than a meter of turning room, before he let any other preparation take place.

And assured himself firmly that he was only doing this for Jane Foster's safety, and _not_  for any personal satisfaction of his own.

Even in chains, the supervillain had a way of projecting the attitude that this was all his idea; he lounged in the chair projecting an air of insouciant boredom while SHIELD personnel scurried around him arranging a multitude of equipment. Jane Foster directed them here and there, while shooting apprehensive and curious glances at their captive. Fury wondered what she knew, and from what sources; he knew she didn't have access to any of the classified debriefs, but that left a multitude of other avenues of research she could divine information from, starting with Thor Odinson himself and continuing right on through the same materials on Norse mythology that Fury himself had a team of analysts dissecting line by line.

For his own part, Loki sat there leveling a glare of such withering disdain at her that she didn't try to open up any kind of conversation with him, and Fury was just as grateful for that.

"All right, all systems are online," Foster announced at last. They had set up what looked to Fury's untrained eye like a bulky home A/V theater, with a wall-sized bank of machines surrounding a comparatively modest glass screen in front of a set of chairs. A couple of deep-dished black 'speakers' were aimed at Loki, off to the side, out of range of the cameras trained forward. Not exactly the setup Fury would have preferred, but he'd take an interdimensional Skype session if it was all he could get. "Signal's steady. Spinning up the microportal in three... two... one... now."

Aside from a minute tone shift in the background humming, nothing seemed to be happening, but a wide relieved smile broke out on Foster's face and even Loki jerked his head back, startled.

"That's it, we're connected," Foster chirped, and waved towards one of the tall and well-muscled lab assistants. "Dave, plug in the converter, let's bring our guy on-screen."

A burst of surprisingly colorful static on the screen resolved itself into a familiar face; Thor Odinson, looking far more at home against a background of grand golden arches and torchlight than he ever had on the Helicarrier. "Thor!" Foster exclaimed, and Fury only _thought_  she'd been smiling before; the grin that split her face now completely transformed her from a rather plain, dark-haired woman into a stunning beauty. "Good to see you again!"

"And I you, Jane Foster," Thor said. His voice was warm, but Fury detected an unmistakable note of strain in it.

"We've got a lot to catch up on," Foster told him. "I've got so much to tell you --"

"Indeed we do, but I fear that it must wait for the time being," Thor said. "Is the shield-master, Nicholas Fury, there? I must have words with him."

"Director Fury? Sure, he's here," Foster said, glancing across at him in surprise. "After what you said last time, I made sure he'd be on hand."

"That is very good. I beg your leave, Jane, but I must speak with him in confidence. It is of a matter most urgent, and my time here is short."

Foster's expression fell, and Fury couldn't really blame her, but there was work to be done. He stepped into the camera's line of sight, hands clasped casually behind his back. "Odinson," he said, giving the man (god?) a respectful nod. Doctor Foster slipped away, disappointment writ large on her face, but Fury had little attention to spare for her now. She could catch up with her alien boyfriend later; Fury had a prisoner to offload.

Thor looked like crap, to Fury's eye; tired and haggard, with his hair unkempt and his skin grayish. His blue eyes were no less electric, though, even through the monitor. "Is my brother there?"

This was enough to stir Loki, who'd been sitting in a sullen silence up till then. He couldn't move nearly far enough to be caught by the cameras, so he settled instead for shouting towards the pickup: "I am _not_  your brother!"

Thor's face lit up in relief. "Oh, he is," he said happily. "That is immeasurably good. Loki must return to Asgard at once."

"There's nothing that would make me happier," Fury said dryly, "but before anyone goes anywhere, I want to know what the _hell_ you were thinking when you took off, left _us_  in charge of restraining your crazy brother, and _didn't make contact when you were supposed to, damn it!"_

The Prince of Asgard looked purely taken aback; probably nobody had ever called him out on his careless behavior before. "I do not understand what you mean, my friend," he said. "I swore that I would speak with you again before three days had passed, and it is only now the evening of the third day."

"Three _Midgardian_  days, Thor!" Loki burst in again from offsides. Fury didn't even bother to try to glare him into silence, left momentarily speechless by Thor's statement. "Three days on _Midgard,_  not Asgard!"

Thor looked purely flummoxed for a moment, before the light seemed to dawn. "The -- oh," he said, and reached up one hand to rub at his eyes. "Of course. I had forgotten that time passes differently in the mortal realm."

So that much was true after all; up until this moment, Fury still hadn't been completely sure that Loki hadn't been making that all up to fuck with their heads. Still, it had never occurred to him to put two and two together and connect Thor's extended absence with what Loki had said about the relative passage of time between realms; and clearly, neither had Thor. Over in his corner Loki looked like he quietly having a conniption fit, a response with which -- for the first time in their history -- Fury found himself in full sympathy.

"Forgive me; I have been much distracted," Thor said, and the exhaustion was plain in his voice. Fury supposed that if it had really been only three days since New York, that might explain the demigod's ragged appearance; it looked like Thor hadn't even gotten a chance to clean up after that last battle.

Not that he intended to let Thor off the hook that easily. "Distracted," he said flatly. "You'll have to enlighten me; what could _possibly_  have kept you so _distracted_  from your duties as an Avenger, keeping tabs on the supervillain who flattened New York?"

"Let me guess; you've spent the days since your return engaged in hunting expeditions," Loki scathed. He wasn't yelling this time; Fury wouldn't have thought he was loud enough to be heard on Thor's end at all, until he recalled how unnaturally sensitive Loki's own hearing was. "Or perhaps tied up with _balls_ and _celebrations._  Oh! Let me take a long shot of a guess -- was there perhaps a _feast_  held in honor of your return, one with a prodigious amount of _drinking?"_

"Asgard has come under attack," Thor said.

That simple statement had the effect of flipping a switch, plunging the atmosphere of the room into somber shock. "By who?" Fury demanded. "More Chitauri again?"

"Would it were any foe so simple," Thor groaned. "Malekith the Exile, pariah of the _dokkalfar,_  leads an assault on Asgard's walls, using black sorcery to bridge the gap between realms and bring his foul army up under our very foundations two nights hence. Heimdall - the Gatekeeper has fallen, and with him the outer defenses. The Accursed One himself tangled Odin in a spell, sending him unnaturally into slumber. We have withdrawn into the inner keep, and yet hold the doors here, but even now his foul sorcery chews at the foundations and saps our strength.

"With the All-Father laid low, there is none in Asgard who has mastery over such sorceries save Loki. His knowledge of magic is unparalleled, both in the attack and defense. Loki _must_  return to Asgard and break Malekith's siege, or Asgard will fall before him ere this day is done. And after Asgard, all the Nine Realms will be dashed beneath his heel!"

Fury opened his mouth, then paused for a moment while he rapidly reshuffled his priorities. This was some _Lord of the Rings_  shit right here, but that didn't mean it wasn't a legitimate threat. Between this Malekith guy and Thanos -- if Loki's account of the guy was at all reliable -- Fury was going to spend so much of his time chasing after extraterrestrial threats as to be all but helpless against domestic ones.

As for Loki himself -- Fury cleared his throat. "So I'm guessing there's no chance of you coming down to Earth to pick him up, then." So much for his imagined scenario of making this _easy._

"Would but I could," Thor grimaced. His hand closed into a tight fist before his chest, and the part of Fury's mind that always kept a watch for details noticed that Mjolnir was nowhere to be found. "The Tesseract was stolen from us in the first assault. Malekith planned his assault well -- he must have had a spy within the walls, giving him detailed knowledge of what was where and when. We stood no chance against him. The traitor will pay for his crimes!"

"Right," Fury said, and shook his head. "I appreciate your position, Odinson, but here's the bad news: we don't _have_  any way of getting your brother back up to you in Asgard. Or else you bet we'd have done it long ago. A full-sized portal is still years beyond our capability."

"We have not years to spare," Thor said. "But that matters little. My brother knows the ways of the secret paths between realms; he needs neither artifact nor bridge to traverse them. Only remove his restraints, and he can find his own way."

Fury took a deep, searing breath, and held it just on the top of his tongue. He counted to ten, then counted again. At least Loki did not take the opportunity to make his thoughts on the matter known; he'd fallen into a frozen silence the moment Thor had announced the attack on Asgard.

"So what you're saying to me," Fury said carefully, "is that after all the trouble we went to catch and hold your crazy supervillain brother in the first place -- after all the havoc he caused getting loose, after all the blood and mess we spent getting him down the second time, after we held him for you for _four fucking weeks_  without a peep from anyone up in Asgard -- you're telling me _now_  that you want me to just _let him go?"_

There was a pause while that one settled in.

"...yes?" Thor responded at last, looking unusually hesitant.

Fury saw red. "You gotta be _shitting_  me."

"I assure you, my comrade, there is no shit," Thor said in a steely voice. "Save perhaps for the very deep shit indeed that we find ourselves in without his skills at magic. Loki's acts upon Midgard cannot be ignored, nor do I say they should be, but right now the fate of our kingdom -- and all those under our protection -- hangs by a thread.

"I know you have little reason to love my brother," Thor told him somberly, because apparently he was competing for understatement of the fucking _year._  "But right now he is our only hope. There will be time to address recompense for the wrongs done to your world afterwards, a suitable bounty repaid -- if there is still an Asgard here to pay it."

Fury's breath hissed out through his teeth. "As soon as we let him go, we lose all control over him!" he pointed out, frustrated as all hell at Thor's inability to _see._  "We take these chains off, he could fuck off to Barbados for all we can do about it. Oh -- yeah, and with a side trip to wreak some more vengeance on our planet! What makes you think he'd even go back to Asgard and not off into hiding somewhere?"

"I know not," Thor said. His image was beginning to futz and fritz ominously, and somehow Fury didn't think it was just a passing aircraft disrupting the signal.  "I know only that we need you now, Loki. You alone have the skills that will save Asgard from this ruin. If you do not come, all will be lo -."

The image blipped, and then the screen went dead. Fury stared at it for a long moment, the same white noise playing in his own mind as he tried desperately to come up with some response.

Somewhere behind him a noise started up, a buzzing rasp that grew quickly to a hysterical coughing. Loki -- still chained to the floor, surrounded by a legion of SHIELD guards and the might of all Earth's most modern technology -- began to laugh.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thor reappears! At damned last. And we finally find out what he's been up to, and why he's so late.
> 
> You may notice a slight shift in tone in this chapter, compared to previous ones. That's because Loki's conversation with Fury was originally part of a different fic, which I discarded because it didn't have enough legs to stand on its own, and was little more than a meta-argument about Loki's original plans and intentions. This is also the cause of some slight inconsistencies you may have noticed (for example, why did Loki imply that he was able to avoid being tortured into compliance when earlier chapters made clear he had been?) If it helps, consider that Loki may not be 100% accurate in what he's telling Fury; he's not being quite dishonest enough for Charles to call him on it, but he's certainly pushing the boundaries of what he can get away with. Loki's still shy of showing weakness to an enemy, and admitting to Fury that he was tortured still falls under that.
> 
> Some liberties have been taken with Thanos' origin here. Mostly because "He comes from the distant cosmic reaches... of SATURN! WEEEEOOOOOOOH!" is a Bronze Age backstory that doesn't hold up too well with how the character has evolved since then. If he and his army of space-breathing lizards were in the same *solar system* as Earth, would he have needed a magical Tesseract portal to invade us? Of course not, he could have just loaded them up on his giant space whales and made it a road trip.
> 
> So in this new cosmology, the 'Titans' are basically god-creators (yes, just like in Warcraft mythos) rather than being "people from the moon Titan." They may or may not have connections with the Celestials, thus imparting a more sinister motive onto their practice of creating pretty worlds and seeding them with sapients. And "the Eternals," which is the race Thanos was originally from (although he looks nothing like them; I'm still not clear on why that is) are now a race of super-long-lived, super-tough humanoids that the Titans made to be guardians of their creations. 
> 
> And yes, this means that the Aesir are Eternals, even if they don't remember where they came from or who originally set them up to guard the Nine Realms. (And the Jotnar are simply Eternals that are mutated/locally-adapted-to-cold. Species that can interbreed despite ostensibly having no biological common ground is my pet peeve; it makes me feel better if I can posit they have a common ancestor.)


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For this chapter, I rewatched some of the scenes of Thor in order to confirm something I'd been wondering; throughout both movies, Loki almost never initiates physical contact (excluding hostile contact like stabbing people in the chest or throwing them out windows.) In the deleted scene before Thor's coronation, it's Thor who reaches out to clasp Loki's neck; in the scene after he kills Laufey, it's Frigga who initiates the embrace. The only time we see Loki actively reach out to anyone is immediately after Odin falls into the Sleep in the vaults, and he's very shy and hesitant when he does. However it came to happen, Loki was extremely reserved and closed about physical affection long before he came to be a supervillain. 
> 
> If anyone is wondering who Xavier went off to talk to so urgently, it was Empress Lilandra. I figure she would be one of the first people he'd want to consult with on hearing news of a genocidal alien warlord in his neighborhood - especially because the Chitauri have ties to the Skrulls, who are long-time enemies of the Shi'ar. She would be able to provide independent confirmation Loki's account of Thanos and give him more information about what sort of threat he and the Chitauri are likely to pose.

The signal dropped before Fury could tell Thor just  _how many_ ways that this was not a good idea, starting with the fact that Fury had no intention of letting Loki go, and continuing on to the fact that Fury had no intention of letting Loki go. To say nothing of the fact that he wasn't even sure Loki  _wanted_  to go back and bail his old countrymen out of whatever fire their fat was in.

Fortunately (or unfortunately, Fury supposed, depending on your point of view) it was a moot point for the time being: until Xavier got back to take his psychic blocks off Loki's magic, he wasn't going anywhere. Loki was surprisingly sanguine about the delay, despite the wild edge of hysteria that remained after he'd finally laughed himself out.

"They've somehow managed just fine without me for this long," Loki said, and by the gleam in his eye Fury didn't think he meant just this latest caper. "They can stew a little longer. A few hours won't make much of a difference from Asgard's point of view."

'A few hours' turned out to be the rest of that day and all that night. Xavier hadn't been kidding when he said he would be incommunicado - not only was he not answering his phone, but that particular line seemed to have dropped completely off the map, returning only a fast-dial that none of his network technicians could trace the other end of at all. Fury knew many secrets, but the location of Xavier's hidden base of operations was one that had always eluded him. After a few fruitless hours trying to contact him through the other mutants they kept tabs on, Fury gave up and went home to bed.

The next morning Xavier turned up on his helicarrier, as neat and cool as though he'd never been missing. Fury didn't know whose mind he'd been reading, but he evinced no surprise when Fury filled him in on the events of the previous day, and showed him their archive of the phone call that had so thoroughly upended all his assumptions.

Xavier watched the recording with an admirable poker face, his expression no more than intent and attentive, his hands resting lightly against each other with no twitches to belie nervousness. Once again Fury found himself wishing Xavier were one of his full-time operatives, if only for his phenomenal self-control. The only subordinate Fury had who could approach that level of calm tranquility in interrogations had been Coulson.

When the recording ended, the tape ran on for a few moments while Xavier paused - contemplating what, Fury could not guess. But at last he turned to face Fury, his eyebrows raised in inquiry. "Thor's request seems straightforward enough," he said. "An explanation for Asgard's extended silence in the matter, and a good beginning for Loki's rehabilitation. What did you want to discuss?"

Fury made a frustrated gesture with both hands, as if he could grab some fragments of sanity out of the air around him. "This wasn't the plan! The plan was, we would pass Loki off into the custody of his people, who would be better equipped to keep Loki contained and handle any trouble he could dish out," he said bitterly. "Now it turns out they have too much trouble of their own to provide any sort of  _containment._ I'm not at all sure I want to turn Loki over to their custody, if doing so means essentially turning him loose."

Xavier shook his head. "You always knew that you could not keep him here forever," he said. He tilted his head, studying Fury's expression with a gaze that saw more than just the surface. "Why the sudden recalcitrance, Director? You were willing enough to let him go to Asgard's justice before."

"That's when I thought he was going to  _face_ justice in Asgard!" Fury snarled. "Whatever their version of justice is for staging an invasion and killing three thousand people! Not be let off the hook scott-free because he does them a few magic favors."

Xavier sighed. "Nicholas, what did you expect from Asgard?" he asked rhetorically. "He's one of theirs - he's family and high-ranking, whatever we may think of it. They're far away, removed from events on Earth. And we can't forget that they're _aliens_. What do a few human lives mean to them? They can't possibly care about destruction that happens here on Earth in anything but the most abstract of ways."

Fury tensed, eyes narrowing as he scrutinized his partner. There weren't many who were familiar enough with him to use his first name, and he didn't appreciate the liberty. "Yeah, well," he bit out. "Apparently they're not the only ones."

Xavier went still, and his expression closed as though shutters had fallen across his face. "What do you mean by that?" he asked in a cold, flat voice - the one Fury had heard so rarely, which heralded the rare displays of real anger.

"I'm saying that  _human lives_  don't seem to matter all that much to  _you,_  either," Fury said savagely. "Ever since you came onto this project, everything has been about what's best for  _poor little Loki!_  Sympathy for the devil! How about sympathy for all his victims in downtown Manhattan? Or were they too  _human_  for you to give a damn? You don't go around preaching mutant superiority like Magneto does, but you sure as hell don't seem to care much about the little people, either!"

"Before you say anything more," Xavier said, in a very soft voice that somehow cut like a razor across Fury's tirade. "Before you say another word, you might want to stop and consider how many mutants live in New York City."

That stopped Fury cold, if only for the seeming  _non sequitur._  He had no idea how many mutants lived anywhere, they didn't exactly fill out the census forms; and what did this have to do with -

"Or rather," Charles continued, "how many of them  _lived_  there."

Insight came like a splash of cold water over Fury's chest, and he fell back on considering statistics. The best estimates of the government researches put the activated X-gene at one-hundredth of a percent of the general population. That seemed like a small number until you matched it up with the twenty  _million_  people living in the Big Apple. Even if no more mutants concentrated there than in the general population - and those mutants they could identify seemed to indicate that they did; the anonymity of city life and the clandestine communities fostered there provided an attraction - that was still over two thousand mutants living in New York City.

"And what do you think the odds are that none of them were endangered - or hurt - or killed by the alien invasion?" Xavier replied to his train of thought. "For the sake of their privacy, I won't reveal numbers - but let's just say that I care very much indeed, about the destruction of downtown New York. Do not assume, Director, that just because you represent the interests of the Federal government in this manner, means that you are the only one who cares about the fate of our  _planet."_

"I've already told you why I prefer to focus on reconciliation and rehabilitation over punishment," Xavier said, leaning back with a little shrug that lessened the tension of the atmosphere. "For both our sakes, let's not go through the whole speech again. Getting Loki out of Earth's custody,  _without_  leaving him with the desire to commit vengeance on innocent people once he does, has  _always_  been my goal."

"I still can't just brush off three thousand murders," Fury muttered.

"Not murder," Xavier contested him. "You attended to the same interview I did. His aim was to destroy the Chitauri army. Invading and killing was never his intention."

Fury let loose an irritated snarl. "Fine; I'll knock the charges down to involuntary manslaughter instead of murder! That's still six hundred years in cold storage."

"Except you know that you could never keep him imprisoned for that long," Xavier said. "The options for dealing with Loki are the same now as they ever were: either kill him, or let him go. And you can't kill him; you know without question now that Asgard would never forgive it."

He said nothing. He didn't need to.

"Unless..." Xavier's voice slowed and deepened, words dropping through the silence as though the air had turned to cold oil. "I see. How very neat it would be. Asgard now depends on Loki, and you control Loki. Eliminate him, and let Asgard fall, and no one will be left to take retribution. No more complications no more interjurisdictional negotiations; close the chapter on these troublesome visitors from the stars forever. Very neat indeed." He leaned back slightly and blinked, shuddering as though emerging from cold water. "I'm almost impressed. Even for you, Nicholas, that's cold."

Fury turned away. "It's my job to consider all contingencies," was all he said. "We can't trust Asgard to always have Earth's better interests in mind."

"Of course it is," Xavier said, cool and clinical. "But Director, you aren't thinking things through."

Fury stirred. "What am I not thinking through?" he demanded.

"Thanos," Xavier said, and the name alone brought an atmosphere of dread to the closed council. "You don't believe in him, but I do. And now Malekith. He's in Asgard now, but do you really think he'll stop there? These extraterrestrial beings  _have_ invaded Earth before, and it was only thanks to Asgard's assistance that we managed to fight them off.

"We have more enemies than ever before. We need allies, and you're getting ready to throw away - not just one, but two of the most powerful allies we could hope to have. Or two thousand. Or three thousand. Or however many innocent lives are up there in Asgard, waiting for us to send them the help they need to survive.

"So I guess the question is," Xavier concluded, "How many people are you willing to let die to have your justice?"

Fury was the one to break off the staring contest, looking away and to the side. "What are our options, then?" he said, exerting great effort to keep his voice even.

"Same as they always were," Xavier replied. "If you can't kill him and you can't hold him forever, the only question is when and under what circumstances to let him loose. I will point out that there will never be a better time to do so - from Earth's perspective - than now. Up till now, we were only keeping him at Asgard's behest; the things he suffered in your captivity can be attributed to their negligence instead of your malice.

"The corollary to that is that if you continue to hold him now, it will be against Asgard's express wishes," Xavier cautioned him. "You'll make a permanent enemy of both him  _and_ them. And whatever's happening up in Asgard, the one thing you can count on is that the situation is  _not under your control;_  you have no idea how much of their power structure would survive to come back to bite us later."

Fury sighed. "Why is it that when I talk to you, I always end up doing the exact opposite of what I intended?" he complained.

Xavier favored him with a slight smile. "Why would you talk to me at all if deep down you didn't know that's exactly what you need to do?"

"I still think this is a bad idea, for the record." Fury shook his head. "Just because it's the least bad of all available options doesn't make it good. I told Odinson, once we release his brother's restraints, we lose all control over him. Who's to say he'll go to Asgard at all, instead of running riot on Earth?"

Xavier inhaled deeply, straightening as much he was able in his chair, and leaned back. "Well... hopefully, me."

* * *

Loki paced his cell, restless within the stultifying boredom of its uninspiring confines. Staring at the peeling paint or bare metal ceiling had lost its charm many hours ago; at least he could let his body work out some of its nervous energy while his mind wandered.

He hadn't slept the last night since Thor made his broadcast, nor the night before that. Two nights of missed rest were hardly likely to harm him, who had gone much longer periods without sleep before - but it was doing nothing good for his thoughts, either, trapped in an endless self-referential spiral.

What to do next? With the  _spaemadr_  gone, it should be a simple enough matter to persuade Fury to release him, ostensibly to go to Asgard's aid. It was so much simpler when he did not have to restrict himself to the truth (although, he thought smugly, there were just as many ways to lie with only truths, as well.) The idea of his impending freedom was heady and intimidating all at once. Loki shied away from thinking why that might be - a month in close captivity, in the quiet and dull confines of this place, should not be enough to accustom him to the  _routine._  Freedom was what he desired. Craved, at any price.

But that still left the question of where he would go once he had that freedom. Not to Asgard, that much was certain. It was no skin off his nose if those dunderheaded fools were incapable of defending their realm against every little invasion - especially against one so feeble and predictable as  _Malekith._  Really, the only reason he might consider getting involved was to save everyone the embarrassment at being so easily defeated by such a -

No. He would not go to Asgard, he reminded himself firmly. He had no ties there (certainly not ties of blood,) and he  _did not care_  if the whole floating mountain came raining down around them.

Except... if Asgard did fall, Odin overthrown, Thor defeated (dead?) then Loki would never have the satisfaction of doing it himself. Would never have the satisfaction of seeing the dumbstruck look on all their faces as he proved himself -

He could go elsewhere. He didn't have to stay on this miserable planet, didn't have to playact as anyone's puppet king; all the Nine Realms were open to him now. He tried to come up with a plan, a role for himself that didn't involve being anyone's punching bag or, Norns forbid, anyone's  _hero._  But the futures that had seemed so bright and shining-clear when Charles described them seemed muddled and incomprehensible when he tried to grasp them himself.

He would not go to Asgard. He would not, he would not. He was done with them, done with being their scapegoat, done with pretending to be a prince. He didn't want to be king there any more, he did not want to pretend to be anyone's  _son_  or anyone's  _brother_  which was only a hideous lie. He would not -

_So long as you strive not towards what you desire, but only in rejection of what you resent, you will always, always fail._

The words slid over his mind, and he shivered. They had the ring of truth, but what good had truth ever done him? How could he strive towards what he desired when he didn't even  _know_  what that was?

The hiss of the cell door jerked Loki out of the rut of his thoughts, and he tensed instinctively as he turned towards the door. _Fool,_  he scolded himself,  _looking up like an eager dog who hears its master's step._  It was probably Fury again, come to bother him some more about Thor's little speech yesterday, there was no reason to think -

It was Charles.

For a moment Loki stood stock-still, his mind blank as he tried to process the fact of the other's presence.  _He came back. He didn't leave. He didn't abandon -_

"So, Loki," Charles said, his hands easing the wheels of his chair through the narrow door. He looked up at Loki with a slight smile, and folded his hands back on his lap. "I hear that you might be graduating from here soon."

"You came back," Loki said, startled into an uncharacteristic bluntness. He'd come back, and he didn't  _have to._  Charles had already gotten his warning about Thanos' existence, his intentions. He had no further  _need_  of Loki. And with Thor petitioning for Loki's release, the humans no longer needed the  _spaemadr_  to keep Loki under control. There was no reason that would have required his return - and yet he'd come back.

"Of course," Charles said quietly. "I promised I would, did I not?"

A wordless noise squeaked past Loki's lips that a part of him devoutly hoped that the cameras did not catch - and then he was stumbling forward to Charles' side. He reached out, then hesitated, his hand hovering inches away from Charles', then drew back.

Charles reached out and completed the gesture, catching Loki's hand between his own. For a moment Loki wondered why the mortal's hands were trembling so, if he was frail or unwell - until he realized that it was his own hand that was shaking.

"It's going to be all right, Loki," Charles said softly. Loki clutched his hand between both of his own and bowed his head, as somewhere inside of him, something that had been cold for a very, very long time began at last to thaw.

 

* * *

 

It was a long moment before Loki could compose himself enough to raise his head and sit back, although he did not yet release Charles' hand. "So, you return," he said, and then cleared his throat to dispel the traitorous roughness. "I hope your errands were fruitful?"  _And done with?_

"I'm sorry that I could not be reached yesterday," Charles said. "I was conferring with some of our allies, regarding the threat presented by Thanos. But I hoped to return to visit you at least once more."

The stirrings of panic still clutched at Loki's heart. "Why, are you leaving again?" he demanded.

"No," Charles said, "but you are."

Cold caution tempered Loki's relief. "What makes you say that?" he said warily.

Charles looked surprised that Loki needed to ask. "Director Fury has filled me in," he said. "I viewed the recording, as well. I assumed you would be going home shortly."

"Ah." Loki pulled back, releasing Charles' hand as he did.  _Now_  he knew why Charles was here. "You assumed wrongly. I no longer have a home."

Charles cocked his head to the side inquiringly. "Will you not be heading back to Asgard?" he asked. "But returning there and helping them with the threat would be the conditions of your release."

Loki's breath hissed through his teeth. "I would rather rot in this jail cell for a hundred years than lift one finger to aid the house of Odin."

"Why not?" Charles looked honestly shocked, then perplexed. "This is your chance - an opportunity to wipe out your ledger, gain your freedom from Earth and a pardon from Asgard at the same time. You could go from being a criminal in their eyes to a hero in one step. Why would you not want that?"

"I tried my hand at  _heroing_  for Asgard once before," Loki said roughly. "For my efforts, I was betrayed and cast down. You'll pardon me if I have not the desire to stick my hand back into the fire just to see if it still burns."

"But they need your help," Charles said, as though that alone should be an argument. Perhaps he truly believed that it was. Charles was so soft-hearted, Loki thought, that he genuinely could not seem to understand that others were not so - he could not seem to comprehend that anyone else would not want to be a  _hero._  How did he maintain such naivete in the face of all the corruption he must see in men's spirits?

"Even so," Charles said, responding readily to Loki's thoughts if not his words, "you can look at it as a transaction, one where you can't help but come out ahead."

Loki scoffed. "They may need me, but I need nothing from them," he said scathingly. "This transaction is vastly imbalanced. From me, the power and knowledge to do what they lack, all their pitiful lives saved, and their puffed-up lands stayed from destruction another day. And I? What do I get out of it, apart from a few empty accolades, and a forgiveness that I neither _need_  nor  _want?"_

Charles looked sad, and Loki hated that pitying look on his face - if only because he knew it intimately, and it galled him to see Charles' wretched compassion turned on anyone else but him. "Is there truly nothing in Asgard for you?" he asked. "Nothing that you would want to see saved or protected?"

 _Mother._  Golden hair and soft hands and a jewel-colored garden centuries gone. Frigga would surely be at Odin's side, defending him with a lioness' valor, as she always had - or would she be with the Völur, instead, wearing away her life to spin shield-spells with the others?

Loki shoved away such treacherous sentimentality, filling his thoughts instead with the memory of Frigga as he had last seen her: the look of horror in her eyes, the way she shrank from his embrace after Thor's disastrous return. There was nothing left to save, there. "No," he said defiantly, as though force of will could make it true. "No, there is nothing for me there. They rejected me, and I was glad enough to reject them in turn, and I owe them  _nothing."_  His voice trembled on the last word.

"You're afraid," Charles said shrewdly.

The words struck him with a pang, and Loki responded in sheer ingrained reflex. "I am no coward!" he snarled.

"Everyone has something they are afraid of, Loki," Charles said. "It's nothing to be ashamed of."

Fat lot Charles knew.

"If this Malekith is able to threaten Asgard with destruction, he must be pretty powerful," Charles went on.

"I do not fear Malekith," Loki scoffed, turning away. "I could defeat him in my sleep." Probably literally, if it came to a contest of dream-walking. In a battle on the astral plane, Loki would comfortably bet on himself against any two elves of Svartalfheim.

"If not Malekith, then what are you afraid of?" Charles asked. "Of failing?"

"Or of succeeding." Loki crossed his arms over his chest, though it was no colder in the cell than it ever had been. "They are one and the same, after all."

"I don't think I understand," Charles said.

Of course he didn't. How could he, when it had taken Loki a hundred years to understand it himself? A hundred years of trying, and trying, and never succeeding. "In Asgard... what you like to call heroism is... taken for granted. The absolute minimum that is required - at least if you are a brother of Thor." Or a son of Odin.

"It sounds like you would need to do something pretty special, to impress them," Charles said. His voice was mild, encouraging, but Loki was not deceived: 'like saving all of Asgard from an invader?' was clearly implied.

He laughed bitterly. "I thought so too," he said. "Which is why I thought if I could have ended the war - if I could have regained the same victory that my father had, but without spilling a single drop of Aesir blood - if I could have destroyed our enemies in one single stroke,  _that_  would be a victory worth noticing. If I could have - "

_I could have done it, Father._

_No, Loki._

Charles winced visibly. "Perhaps your great plans could stand a little auditing beforehand," he admitted.

"It matters not whether my plans succeed," Loki said. "If I were to succeed beyond their wildest dreams, that would still be no more than what is merely expected. But should I fail - or even succeed in a manner other than what is expected - they will not hesitate to censure me."  _To crucify me._

"But right now you have them over a barrel," Charles pointed out persuasively. "In the straits they're in now, they're in no shape to place conditions on your help. They'll have to approve of whatever methods you choose to employ, or whatever conditions you demand in recompense."

Loki rather thought that Charles was underestimating the extent to which the Aesir valued their mindless, stubborn pride - and how many casualties they were willing to sacrifice to protect it.

"In fact," a razor thin smile crossed over Charles' face, "you could go up there in your true skin, your Jotun skin, and they would have no choice but to fete you like a hero all the same. Perhaps you should; it would teach them a lesson."

Loki glared. "That's quite the hypocrisy, coming from you," he bit out, "considering that  _you_  not only hide your true nature from the world, but demand that all your vassals do the same. Who are you to dare others to brazen honesty, at the cost of public shame?"

The acid in his voice took even him by surprise; he had hardly realized how deep this bitterness ran. For a moment he wished he could take the words back, fearful of alienating his only ally... but no. For the past week Charles had persistently ignored or brushed aside Loki's fervent efforts to drive him away; surely he would not change his mind  _now_.

"...a fair point," Charles admitted in a strained voice.

Loki folded his arms and said nothing. He knew what Charles was trying to do, to manipulate and persuade him, and he had no intention of helping him along. Charles tried another tack.

"Well, something to consider is that if you go back now, you go as a free man, and you can always leave again after," Charles said in a reasonable tone. "But if you don't go, and Asgard falls, that will be done forever and there will be no going back from it. You will never know if you might have made the difference."

Loki's lip curled upwards in a sneer. "I certainly know that I would not care," he said.

"Wouldn't you?" Charles challenged. "You took an oath to protect Asgard, did you not? If that loyalty extended as far as protecting Earth from Thanos, surely you have even more obligation to protect Asgard."

 _That_  stung, ground right in the raw spot that had chafed him for so long: that even after his fall and exile, still he had tried to uphold his oaths. There had been times, among the pits of the Chitauri, where that oath had been the only thing holding his sanity together. And now Charles tried to use that as a lever to force him, to crush his resistance? "They betrayed me first!" he snarled, furious at the renewed memory. "Not a day before their oaths were cold did they forsake them, forsake  _me_  - not that anyone cared about that! What worth is in a loyalty that runs only one way? Why should I cherish my oaths to them so dearly, when they cared about theirs to me not at all?"

"It was not all of Asgard that turned on you," Charles offered. "Surely it's not fair to punish them all for the actions of a few."

"But they were the ones who should have known me best!" Loki paced restlessly around the room, driven to ceaseless motion by the resentment and injury seething under his skin. "I had fought beside them for a hundred years, watched their backs and saved their lives countless times. I saved Fandral's on Jotunheim - I saved  _all_  of their lives from my brother's brash idiocy! And yet before two days had passed they did not hesitate to slander me, to judge my actions and accuse me of _treason_  - I, who did more for Asgard than all of them put together!"

"They had reason to be worried," Charles said quietly. "Your intentions were not exactly clear."

"They had no proof!" Loki whirled to face Charles, fury spiking. "None! They had no reason to accuse me except - except by their own admission that they did not  _understand_ me, and what they could not understand, they despise! They thought it enough to judge, that because of some petty childhood conflict with Thor, that I would betray my own home - my king - my country, my father -"

"Loki," Charles interrupted him, and Loki realized he was hyperventilating.

"Such was the loyalty of Asgard," Loki said savagely. "All I had ever done, all I had ever  _been_ , and they threw it aside in a moment, because of  _Thor_!"

He turned abruptly away, hands clenching into fists as he struggled to leash his bitter anger, his frustration and resentment and rage. When at last he thought he could control his voice, he spoke again.

"Any good memories I had of Asgard have been tainted beyond redemption." Loki turned back and looked at Charles somberly. "Whether the fault was in me or in them, the result is as you see. You have given me - reason to think - that I may be otherwise, and I so wish it. I wish..." His throat tightened, thick with these strange new thoughts - these unfamiliar needs and wants, that he knew not how to express.

"But if I go back, nothing will have changed, everything will still be the same - they will suck me right back into the games of hero and villain that nearly destroyed me." He gave a bitter laugh. "Why would I go back to the house where my spirit was so poisoned?"

A dozen heartbeats passed, and Loki knew that Charles had no answer for him.

"You're right," Charles admitted quietly. "You shouldn't have to go back. And I can't, in good conscience, force you to."

Loki's breath hitched, seeming to freeze in his chest. Part of him felt triumphant, vindicated by Charles' admission - but another part of him felt bitterly disappointed. As though he'd  _wanted_ Charles to convince him after all.

Charles sighed sadly. "I can't tell you what to do, Loki," he said. "I'm not your father nor your commanding officer. I can't make you do anything and I won't punish you or withdraw my support no matter what you do or don't do."

That reminder eased the panic clutching Loki's chest, even as it left him feeling oddly desolate. But no amount of reassurances could change the weight of expectation. "But you think I should go back," he challenged.

"I do," Charles said with a nod. Then he corrected himself, "Or say rather, I would  _like_ it if you went back."

Loki thought about that. No matter how he tried to approach it, he couldn't figure Charles out. What stake could he possibly have in the continued survival or well-being of Asgard, a land he'd never visited and most likely never would? In the well-being of people who most likely, if he ever met them, would despise him for the evidence of his physical frailty and for the power of the mind that he wielded?

 _"Why?"_  he said at last.

Charles shrugged. "I don't have a good argument, really," he said. "It's just something I believe. That if you can help someone, you should."

_If you can help someone, you should._

_Is that why you helped me?_ Loki thought. He could not, would not even try to deny the kindness that Charles had lavished on him from the start: pulling him from the horrors of his own mind, easing his restraints, bringing him food and water when no one else would; the translated letter, the books, the freeing of Loki's mind. In all likelihood Loki would be dead by now if not for Charles, and he'd fought him every inch of the way, only ever repaid him with slights and insults and childish temper tantrums. Even now he argued with Fury for Loki's freedom - and why?

_If you can help someone, you should._

What had Loki ever done for Charles, that might repay his generosity? Loki wasn't sure that anything could; he had nothing that Charles needed. Even now, the first time he ever asked Loki for anything, it was a favor from which he would never reap a single benefit. Perhaps there was no way to give back such kindness. Perhaps it was something you could only give on to others.

"I will go back," he said aloud.

Charles smiled.

"But I won't enjoy it," he said acidly, just for appearance's sake.

Charles laughed. "I think you may enjoy it more than you think," he said, "once you realize how much sanctioned havoc you can commit."

Loki shrugged. It was only beginning to dawn on him just what this commitment would entail - he would have to return to Asgard along the dark paths, skirting the Void that had once pulled him over. He would have to face them again, all those whom he had betrayed and disappointed, who had betrayed and disappointed him - Thor, Frigga, Odin - they would never forgive him, he could not forgive them, it was impossible, impossible -

"Remember, Loki," Charles said, interrupting the tide of building dread. "Remember who you are; neither a failure, nor a monster, nor evil. You have always fought for Asgard, for Earth, for the greater good. You have a good heart. Do not let others, through their words or their actions, make you forget that heart."

Loki was not at all sure that he  _did -_  but the way Charles said it, in a tone of such certainty, made him  _want_  to believe it. Made him want to prove Charles right, make him proud. He nodded.

"I meant what I said earlier, you know," Charles said, his voice gentling. "You don't have to stay on Asgard, after the threat is gone. I'd like to see you again. If you would, you could come by my school. Some of my students - there are a few that shift shape, as you do. And one who is learning to control magic. They could greatly benefit from an elder to guide them."

Loki hummed noncommittally. "Perhaps," he acknowledged, although the idea quite intrigued him. He had never tried to teach anyone before. That prospect was frightening too, in its own way: the fear of the unknown, of crossing new frontiers. Frightening, but exciting.

"Even if you don't," Charles said, "you would always be welcome at my school. You know where to find me."

He hadn't before; but now that Charles said the words, he found he suddenly did. A little town buried in the north-eastern part of this country; a cozy lane, a sprawling mansion, wooded hills that took on the color of fire in the autumn. The  _spaemadr_ must have put the knowledge directly in his head, but Loki did not think he blamed him for not wishing to speak it aloud. He felt a sudden, intense surge of longing for the place - to go  _home_  to a place he had never been before.

"You can come and find me, any time you need to talk," Charles said firmly. "I imagine there will be a lot you'll want to talk about, after you're finished in Asgard."

It seemed almost hubristic, to talk of victory in Asgard before he had even begun. Yet it helped, somehow, to imagine a future - a life beyond  _going back._  The road did not seem so dark, so close. Loki took a deep breath, and pushed his shoulders back and his head high. "Perhaps," was all he said.

But  _perhaps_  was not  _no, never._  It was a possibility - a cracked-open door, through which a whole new world could be seen.

* * *

It was not quite that simple, of course. No change-of-status could be effected on a government prisoner without a metric ton of accompanying paperwork, and SHIELD was still a government agency, no matter how clandestine.

At last, though, the three of them - Fury, Xavier, and Loki - stood in an antechamber, of sorts, near the roof of the Carrier. There was little visible change to mark Loki's new status as a free man; they had stopped using restraints on him at Xavier's request long ago, and if SHIELD still had his old clothes stashed somewhere they weren't in a hurry to admit it. They certainly weren't going to be returning his scepter, the only other possession to his name when he'd stepped onto Earth.

Fury stood by, looking deeply unhappy but also resigned. That didn't stop him from delivering an eleventh-hour shovel speech to his soon-to-be-former prisoner, though.

"We have everyone even remotely connected with SHIELD and the Avengers under twenty-four-hour surveillance," he warned Loki. "If you start anything with any of them, if you so much as blink in their direction - we will be down on your ass with the full team of Avengers before that blink finishes."

Loki's lip curled. "Believe me, Director," he drawled. "Words can hardly convey how little I wish to have  _anything_  to do with you and your..." He paused, apparently rifling through a choice of words, before settling on "flying  _circus_."

He dismissed Fury from his attention, and moved on to Xavier, seated in his wheelchair further away from the door.

Xavier smiled at him, the same kind smile that Loki had first seen when he'd come out of his enforced flashback in SHIELD custody. Loki shifted uncomfortably, hands twitching slightly at his sides, and Xavier's smile widened as he sensed Loki's conflict.

"Come on," he said with a slight chuckle, "it's perfectly traditional, when a family member departs on a long journey."

Loki flushed slightly, muttering something under his breath, but he moved forward; Xavier reached up to return the embrace, resting his hand lightly on the back of Loki's shoulder while Loki clung to him fiercely. It was strange, Loki thought, how light and weak and  _mortal_  he seemed on the outside; Loki well knew the power encased in that fragile shell. Strength and weakness, power and kindness - it was a combination Loki would never have imagined, before meeting Charles Xavier.

After a long moment, he loosed his hold and stepped back, avoiding their gazes. The stiff set of his shoulders defied anyone to comment; Fury wouldn't dare, and Xavier wouldn't dream of it.

"Well, let's get on with it," Fury said ungraciously. They were all aware of the time ticking away, the longer they lingered. The flow of time between Earth and Asgard meant that they could delay for a time, but not forever. "Do whatever it is you need to do, in order to release his magic."

Xavier's eyebrows went up in surprise. "What, the mental blocks?" he said. "Oh, I removed those ages ago."

Loki and Fury both stared at him, with expressions of surprise and disbelief so similar they were almost comical. " _What?"_  Fury demanded, almost at the same time that Loki cried, " _When?"_

"As soon as I witnessed the recorded request of the King of Asgard to have you released," Xavier said. "At that point, as far as I was concerned, you were no longer our prisoner. The only reason Loki has not vanished himself, Director, is that he didn't _want_  to."

Before Fury could respond to that, Loki stood up straight and took two steps into the center of the room. His hands twitched, and a whisper of soundless voice escaped from him -  _pass breath over lips,_  Thor had said. The air around Loki shimmered and swirled, a coruscating aura of dark violet and green; it sank down over his legs and feet and became hard, dark leather, swirled bright up around his chest and arms and became triumphant gold.

When the smoke cleared, Loki stood before them in all his ceremonial armor - not quite what he'd been wearing in the clips of him leading his invasion, but the same style, the same colors, the same deadly promise of danger. No longer prisoner or patient, but unmistakably a  _prince._

He even wore the golden helm, its smooth curved prongs arcing upwards to increase the intimidation of his already formidable height. A bit  _too_  formidable, perhaps, for this room; the pointed tips scraped painfully on the ceiling when he lifted his head. He grimaced, and gestured quickly again; the helmet swirled and disappeared, unconjured to whatever strange store it had come from.

Loki struck a stiff pose, his fist clenched and his arm folded across his heart, and inclined his upper body slightly towards Xavier. "Charles Xavier, King of Mutants," he said in a formal tone; "You have the gratitude of Loki of Asgard. If there is any boon or service I can provide for you or your people, you have but to ask, and it shall be yours."

"Thank you, Loki," Xavier said, smiling slightly. "And my doors are always open to you, you know that."

Loki nodded once, firmly, in acceptance of the contract. Then his eyes slid over to Fury, and his lips twisted in a sardonic smile.

"You, not so much," he said.

"I wasn't planning to put you in my rolodex, either," Fury shot back. "As far as I'm concerned, you've still got about five hundred years of community service owed."

"For the sake of your allies, I am willing to overlook your tresspasses against my person," Loki said coldly. "But you would be wise not to press your luck."

"Loki," Xavier said in a gently warning tone. He and Loki exchanged a long glance, and Loki looked away first; he did not pick any further fights with Fury.

Fury reached out and punched a series of buttons into the keypad by the door, and it rolled aside with a hissing that quickly escalated to a roar. Sunlight streamed in through the door as high-altitude wind whipped around it, and all of their ears popped as the air pressure in the chamber dropped dramatically.

Looking at the door, Loki inhaled deeply through his nose, looking endearingly young and nervous despite the imposing armor. He pushed his back to painful straightness, jerked his chin up, and walked out through the portal.

For the first few steps, he looked perfectly normal, just a tall dark-haired man walking unbowed through the winds. By the fourth step, the colors and shadows on him had shifted, as though the light that shone on him was no longer the light of the sun above; by the sixth step, he was gone. The two men of Earth - one human, the other not quite - stood for a long moment, watching the place where he'd disappeared.

"Well, at least he's out of our hair," Fury sighed. "With any luck, he'll get killed or at least distracted in his little interfactional spat, and never darken my planet again."

"On the contrary," Xavier said unexpectedly. "I dearly hope he does."

"Why, because you'll  _miss_  him?" Fury said incredulously.

Xavier shrugged. "In part," he said. "Mostly, so that I can continue guiding him. To tell you the truth, Director, I'm not exactly pleased with letting him run around unsupervised in this state..."

"You're telling  _me_  that?" Fury muttered.

"I would have preferred to have more time with him," Xavier said. "In some ways, Loki is still very... fragile."

Fury scoffed. "I wouldn't call anyone who survived a close and personal argument with the Hulk as 'fragile,' " he said.

"Fragile in regards to his moral and emotional maturity," Xavier clarified. "He's come a long way in the past week, but a week is... only a week, and the scars and wounds he seeks to overcome were years in the making. It's not an easy road to travel; he'll need someone to guide him on it. And if there had been anyone in Asgard capable of helping him, he never would have gotten to this state in the first place."

Fury had to agree with that, but preferred not to say so, restricting his commentary to a noncommittal "Mm," instead.

Xavier's tone and expression grew more serious. "Loki has a long, long path leading out of the darkness," he went on. "His capacity for empathy to the suffering of others is still quite limited. He wants - he truly wants - to do good, but in many ways is blind as to what that  _means._  He still does not really understand why the things he did on Jotunheim, nor on Earth, were wrong. Until he can understand  _why_  he is being punished, to torment him for his crimes would only drive him further into hatred.

"This mission in Asgard could be a breakthrough for him," Xavier said thoughtfully. " _If_  he is able to meet the threat and overcome it, without resorting to atrocity - and  _if_  his good deeds are recognized and lauded by his people, and he is rewarded for them - then I believe he will truly be able to grow into the role. If he can begin to believe in himself as a good person, then he can begin to feel remorse for the lives he has destroyed. But if they do not..."

He trailed off, and Fury looked sharply at him. "You think he'd go back to being a supervillain again?" he demanded. "Come back and wreak more havoc on Earth? Then what do we do, when we're right back where we started?"

"If he relapses, and he is lost to the darkness, and I cannot reach him... then, Director Fury, we may have no choice but to end his life," Xavier said bleakly. His hands clenched into fists, twisting in cloth even as he made the admission. "I hope - devoutly hope - that it will never come to that. You are correct when you suspected I care for him. But he can't be contained, and he will not age; and he is far, far too dangerous to be allowed to rampage at will."

Fury stared at his colleague, incredulous. "That's what I've been arguing for  _weeks!"_  he complained. " _You_  were the one who insisted that execution was off the table!"

"Of course I did," Xavier said with asperity, "otherwise it would have been your preferred solution every time we hit a setback. But I had to try, Director. I had to give him this chance. You should know about that, I think. Second chances you've given to others. And second chances you've been given."

Fury fell silent again. He did. But that didn't mean he liked it.

"I hope you know what you're doing, Professor," he muttered.

"So do I," Xavier said softly, and tilted his head back to look up at the sky, tracing an imaginary pathway branching through the sun-shot clouds. "I truly do."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whew! We've reached the end of the fic! I really am sorry to all the people who were hoping to see more - more of the other X-men, more of the Avengers, or more of Loki's adventures back in Asgard. Those would be great things, and I hope to address (some) of them in other fics I do, but that was never the goal of this fic - it was intended entirely to focus on the relationship between Loki and Charles, and was always meant to end when Loki left SHIELD captivity. I'm just sorry it took me so long to complete!
> 
> I do plan to write at least another one-shot in this continuity - with Xavier, Loki and Thor, considerably later on. And enough people have convinced me that Loki guest lecturing at Charles' school would be AWESOME that I'd like to do something that features that as well, if I could find a story in me for it. But for the time being I'm going to focus on other projects, which feature more of the Avengers and less of the X-men characters.


End file.
